New members inducted into Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars

Ten women and men who spent formative parts of their illustrious careers at Johns Hopkins were formally inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars on Monday night in a ceremony at the George Peabody Library.

Nominated by JHU faculty, the inductees were presented with the Society of Scholars medallion and an official certificate of membership. The event was hosted by JHU President Ronald J. Daniels and Provost Sunil Kumar.

"Throughout your lives and careers, the new ideas you have offered to the world have expanded not just the boundaries of your respective fields, but the horizon of our collective life," Daniels said. "Taken together, your contributions have ensured that human knowledge shall never shrink back to its former dimensions."

Of the 13 individuals selected to join the Society of Scholars this year, eight were in attendance at Monday's event. A ninth—Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, president of Afghanistan—was represented by Hamdullah Mohib, Afghan ambassador to the United States. Hynd Bouhia, among 16 individuals selected for induction in 2017, was also in attendance Monday and was among those formally honored.

The Society of Scholars was created on the recommendation of then university President Milton S. Eisenhower and approved by the board of trustees on May 1, 1967. The society—the first of its kind in the nation—inducts former postdoctoral fellows, postdoctoral degree recipients, house staff, and junior or visiting faculty who have served at least a year at Johns Hopkins and thereafter gained marked distinction elsewhere in their fields of physical, biological, medical, social, or engineering sciences or in the humanities and for whom at least five years have elapsed since their last Johns Hopkins affiliation.

This year's cohort features scholars from around the world, including Afghanistan, France, and Mexico. They are renowned astronomers and public health professionals; leaders of museums and universities; cancer and Alzheimer's researchers; public intellectuals, advisors to U.S. presidents, and foreign heads of state.

The new members for 2018 are:

Sergio Aguayo, PhD

Mexico City, Mexico | Read bio

Sergio Aguayo, a noted scholar and political analyst,
 has been a professor and researcher at El Colegio de México since 1977. He has also taught at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University as 
the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and other institutions
 in Mexico, the United States, and Europe. He holds the highest membership level in Mexico's national researcher system, Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, and is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on national security, human rights, democracy, and Mexico's foreign relations. He is also a frequent writer for newspapers and magazines, most notably Mexico City's Reforma, where he contributes a weekly column, and he is a founding member of La Jornada newspaper. Since March 2001, he has been a regular participant in the weekly television program Primer Plano, and from 2009 to 2015, he was on Carmen Aristegui's Mesa Política radio program.

From 1990 to 1996, Dr. Aguayo was president of the Academia Mexicana de Derechos Humanos, and from 1994 to 1999 he was a leading member of Civic Alliance, one of Mexico's most prominent NGOs. He received a bachelor's degree in international relations from El Colegio de México and a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where he subsequently pursued a postdoctoral fellowship.

Ronald S. Brookmeyer, PhD

Los Angeles, California | Read bio

Ronald Brookmeyer, a professor of biostatistics in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, uses the tools
 of the statistical, informational, and mathematical sciences to address global public health problems. Over three decades, he has developed statistical methods 
that have sounded the alarm and helped address major global health challenges of our times. With work beginning in the mid-1980s, for example, Dr. Brookmeyer earned worldwide recognition for his prediction of the magnitude of the impending HIV/AIDS epidemic. He also called attention to the looming Alzheimer's epidemic through widely cited studies, and he serves on the board of reviewing editors of Science magazine. Dr. Brookmeyer is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the American Public Health Association's Spiegelman Gold Medal in health statistics and of the American Statistical Association's Nathan Mantel Lifetime Achievement Award. After completing
 his PhD in statistics at the University of Wisconsin, he joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 1981. During his 28-year career at Johns Hopkins, he served as the chair of the Bloomberg School's Master of Public Health Program. In recognition of his service, Dr. Brookmeyer was the 2009 recipient of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Ernest Lyman Stebbins Medal for outstanding contributions to the school's educational programs.

Andrew Connolly, DIC, PhD

Seattle, Washington | Read bio

Andrew Connolly is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington, where he holds a Washington Research Foundation Data Science Chair in the Astronomy Department. He is also director of the university's Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology Institute, which he founded in 2017. An internationally recognized expert in the fields of statistics and machine learning, Dr. Connolly co-founded what was one of the first collaborations between astrophysicists, computer scientists, and statisticians while on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. His group's work on statistical methodologies led to measurements of the properties of dark energy—the energy density that drives the expansion of our universe—that were named by Science magazine as the top scientific discovery of 2003.

After completing a PhD in physics and astronomy at Imperial College London, he was a postdoctoral fellow and assistant research scientist in Johns Hopkins' Department of Physics and Astronomy from 1993 to 1999. While at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Connolly joined the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, developing techniques for characterizing how cosmological structures within the universe evolve with time. This led to a career working on the design of some of the largest astronomical survey telescopes in the world, including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which 
will image the night sky visible from northern Chile every night for 10 years. He was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2000 to develop visualization techniques for complex data sets, research that led to his work as project leader for Google Sky during a sabbatical at Google in 2007. A prolific writer who 
is widely cited by his peers, Dr. Connolly is a co-author of the book Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy, which was honored with the International Astrostatistics Association's Outstanding Publication Award for 2016.

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, PhD

Kabul, Afghanistan | Read bio

A renowned scholar of anthropology and political science, Mohammad Ashraf Ghani is the president of Afghanistan. When foreign invasion and civil war in that country led to the persecution of his family and forced him into exile in 1977, he pursued his education in the United States, earning his doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University and teaching at UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University. He then joined the World Bank, where he learned the tools of international development. Following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Dr. Ghani returned to Afghanistan to devote his unique skills and knowledge to rebuilding the country. He advised interim President Hamid Karzai and until December 2004 served as the finance minister in the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan. During his tenure as finance minister, he designed a package of reforms and initiated several public investment programs that led to significant improvements in the livelihoods of ordinary Afghans. He declined to join the newly elected government in December 2004, choosing instead to become the chancellor of Kabul University. He remained an influential voice in political circles, both in Afghanistan and abroad. Oxford University Press published in 2009 a book he co-authored, Fixing Failing States. In 2010, he served as chairman of the Transition Coordination Commission, which was responsible for transferring authority from foreign to national troops. He resigned from TCC in October 2013 to run for president, a position he has held since September 2014.

Lynn R. Goldman, MD

Washington, D.C. | Read bio

Pediatrician and epidemiologist Lynn R. Goldman is the Michael and Lori Milken Dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. She is a renowned expert in pediatric environmental health and public policy surrounding chemicals. As such, she has contributed academic scholarship that has helped shape this field of study. Dr. Goldman also has engaged in translating research to policy through writing analyses and giving congressional testimony supporting efforts, ultimately successful, to achieve passage of reforms to both federal pesticide law and federal chemicals law. From 1999 to 2010, she was a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty, Dr. Goldman was assistant administrator for toxic substances at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she directed the Office of Chemical Safety and Prevention from 1993 to 1998. She also held various positions at the California Department of Public Health, including chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from UC Berkeley, her medical degree from UC San Francisco, and a master's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University; she conducted her pediatric residency training at the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland.

A longtime member of the National Academy of Medicine, she received the Walsh McDermott Award for service to the academy. She is a recipient of the prestigious Heinz Award for her work to protect people from toxic chemicals, and the American Public Health Association Environment Section's Homer N. Calver Award. Dr. Goldman serves on several influential boards, including the National Academy of Sciences Governing Board, the Environmental Defense Fund Board of Trustees, and the Food and Drug Administration Science Board.

Tomás R. Guilarte, PhD

Miami, Florida | Read bio

Tomás R. Guilarte is dean of the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work at Florida International University, where he is also a professor. His research explores the impact of environmental pollutants on neurological and mental health. Using behavioral, cellular, and molecular approaches, his studies range from the primary culture of brain cells to the application of brain-imaging technologies. He is renowned for revealing the effects of low-level lead exposure on the central nervous system during brain development, a discovery that led to strategies for mitigating neurological damage.

Dr. Guilarte's research team has also played an important role in the validation and application of translocator protein 18 kDa (TSPO) as a biomarker for brain injury and inflammation that is used clinically around the world. He has made seminal discoveries on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of manganese-induced parkinsonism, a disorder that causes neurological symptoms closely resembling Parkinson's disease. He has served in many national and international study sections, including as a member of the advisory council for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Among the many honors Dr. Guilarte has received is the Hispanic Organization of Toxicologists' Distinguished Toxicologist Award. He was a student in the inaugural class, in 1976, of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences (now Environmental Health and Engineering) at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He received his PhD from that department in 1980 and spent three decades there as a professor and researcher. He went on to serve as the inaugural Leon Hess Endowed Professor and chairman of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Patrick Hwu, MD

Houston, Texas | Read bio

Tumor immunologist Patrick Hwu is head of the MD Anderson Cancer Center's Division of Cancer Medicine, which consists of 13 clinical and three basic science departments. With a focus on vaccines, adoptive T-cell therapies, and immune resistance, Dr. Hwu's research and clinical efforts have led to advances in the understanding of interactions between tumors and the immune system, and he has contributed to the development of cellular therapies, including the infusion of CAR T-cells to produce an immune response to attack cancer cells. He is the principal investigator on several NIH translational immunotherapy grants and other peer–reviewed grants. Dr. Hwu earned his medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Following his service as a house officer in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1987 to 1989, he completed a fellowship in oncology at the National Cancer Institute, where he continued to work for 10 years as a principal investigator leading tumor immunology studies. He was recruited in 2003 to MD Anderson Cancer Center as the first chairman of the Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology. He has served as co-director of the Center for Cancer Immunology Research since 2004 and as chair of the Department of Sarcoma Medical Oncology since 2012. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to cancer research, Dr. Hwu has held endowed positions since joining the institution. He currently holds the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Distinguished University Chair at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Louise D. McCullough, MD, PhD

Houston, Texas | Read bio

Louise D. McCullough holds the Roy M. and Phyllis Gough Huffington Distinguished Chair and is a professor of neurology at McGovern Medical School of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and chief of Neurology at Memorial Hermann–Texas Medical Center. She is a physician scientist and a practicing vascu
lar neurologist with clinical expertise in sex and gender disparities, as well as stroke prevention, treatment, and outcome assessment. Dr. McCullough is renowned for her work in cerebral vascular disease and is known for her research identifying sex differences in cell death pathways during stroke, a finding that has proved to be a major factor in the response to an ischemic insult. She was instrumental in the development of the National Institutes of Health's requirement to include female animals in basic and translational studies. Among Dr. McCullough's many honors and awards are the prestigious Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the American Heart Association's Stroke Research Mentor Award. She earned both a PhD in neuroscience and a medical degree at the University of Connecticut and continued her training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was a resident in neurology from 1996 to 2000 and a fellow in cerebrovascular disease and stroke. She then joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine as an instructor and then an assistant professor in neurology. Dr. McCullough relocated to Connecticut in 2004 and over the next eight years rose to the rank of professor in the departments of Neurology and Neuroscience at UConn Health and
at UConn John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington, Connecticut. She became the director of stroke research and education at Hartford Hospital and developed one of the largest stroke centers in New England. In 2015, she relocated to UT Health, whose neurology department is now one of the top 20 NIH-funded neurology departments in the country.

Craig J. Newschaffer, PhD

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | Read bio

Craig J. Newschaffer is a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and associate dean for research at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. He is also the founding director of the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, the first autism research center taking a comprehensive public health science approach to the challenges posed by autism spectrum disorders and related neurodevelopmental conditions. Dr. Newschaffer, a fellow of the American College of Epidemiology, is also past chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Dornsife School of Public Health and past vice president of the International Society for Autism Research. He has served on the Department of Defense Autism Research Program Integration Panel, the Autism Speaks Science Advisory Board, and, on multiple occasions, the Interagency Autism Coordinating Council Strategic Plan for Autism Spectrum Disorder Research expert review group. Dr. Newschaffer applies epidemiology to study autism spectrum disorder etiology, with a focus on potentially modifiable risk factors and complex mechanisms. His work in this area has been important in sustaining momentum for the responsible study of environmental autism risk factors as well as in furthering our understanding of the morbidity and impairment associated with autism spectrum disorders from a population perspective. Dr. Newschaffer received his PhD in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins University in 1996 and was a member of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 1999 to 2006.

Sonja A. Rasmussen, MD, PhD

Atlanta, Georgia | Read bio

Sonja A. Rasmussen is deputy director for infectious diseases and director of the Office of Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers on the risk factors for birth defects, morbidity, and mortality owing to genetic conditions, and the effects of emerging infections on pregnant women and their fetuses. A clinician scientist at the CDC for 20 years, Dr. Rasmussen has taken lead roles during several public health emergencies, including the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic and the 2014 outbreak of the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus. She served as acting director of the CDC's Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response during the response to the Ebola epidemic 
and was at the forefront of the CDC's Zika response. She was lead author of the New England Journal of Medicine paper confirming Zika as a cause of birth defects, senior author on a paper describing the congenital Zika syndrome, and senior author on several papers summarizing the CDC's recommendations for the care of infants born to mothers infected with Zika virus during pregnancy.
 Dr. Rasmussen recently served as editor-in-chief of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the most frequently cited journal in the field of epidemiology. After earning her medical degree from the University of Florida College of Medicine and completing her pediatrics residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Rasmussen completed fellowships in clinical genetics at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the University of Florida.

Jeremy N. Rich, MD, MHS, MBA

San Diego, California | Read bio

Jeremy Rich is director of neuro-oncology, director of the Brain Tumor Institute, and professor of medicine at University of California, San Diego. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the study of cancer stem cells and neuro-oncology. His group first demonstrated that stem-like tumor cells in any solid cancer promote therapeutic resistance and angiogenesis, supporting the clinical relevance of cancer stem cells. Leveraging patient-derived models, Dr. Rich's group
 has defined critical molecular regulation in cancer stem cells, identifying points of fragility that have supported the development of clinical trials for the treatment of primary and metastatic brain and spinal cord tumors. He remains clinically active, serving patients afflicted with brain cancer. Dr. Rich was an inaugural recipient of the National Cancer Institute's Outstanding Investigator Award and has received numerous other awards. After earning his medical degree from Duke University School of Medicine in 1993, he completed a medical internship and neurology residency from 1994 to 1997 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He then returned to Duke to complete a neuro-oncology fellowship and join the faculty. In 2008, he joined the Cleveland Clinic to build a stem cell research enterprise. He served as the inaugural chair of the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic and co-director of the National Center for Regenerative Medicine until 2017, when he was recruited by UC San Diego.

Daniel Weiss, PhD

New York, New York | Read bio

Daniel Weiss is president and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the largest and most diverse art museums in the world. Before joining the Met in 2015,
 Dr. Weiss served as president of Lafayette College and then of Haverford College. A leading voice on liberal arts colleges in a changing higher education landscape, he co-edited Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts, published in 2014. From 2002 to 2005, Dr. Weiss was the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins, where he had previously been a professor and chair of the Department of the History of Art. He earned a doctorate in art history from Johns Hopkins and joined the faculty in 1993. He holds 
a bachelor's degree from George Washington University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management, and was a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton from 1985 to 1989. Dr. Weiss has written or edited five books and numerous articles on the art of the Middle Ages and other topics, including higher education and World War II. His research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, Yale University, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In 1994, he was awarded the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize by the Medieval Academy of America for a first article in Medieval Studies judged to be of outstanding quality.

Elias Zerhouni, MD

Paris, France | Read bio

Elias Zerhouni is president of global research and development and a member of the executive committee at Sanofi, a global biopharmaceutical company. His academic career was spent at Johns Hopkins, beginning in 1975 with his residency in diagnostic radiology. He rose 
to the rank of full professor of radiology in 1992 and of biomedical engineering in 1995 before being named chair of the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences in 1996. During the following years, he rose rapidly within Johns Hopkins, assuming additional duties as vice dean for research, and executive vice dean of the School of Medicine from 1996 to 2002, before his tenure, from 2002 to 2008, as director of the National Institutes of Health. In that position, Dr. Zerhouni oversaw the NIH's 27 institutes and centers with more than 18,000 employees and a budget of $29.5 billion. In April 2009, Dr. Zerhouni returned to Johns Hopkins to serve as senior adviser for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Then in November 2009, President Obama appointed him one of the first presidential U.S. science envoys. Dr. Zerhouni has founded or co-founded five startup companies, authored more than 200 publications, and holds eight patents. He has a number of prominent positions on advisory boards, including most recently, the board of the Lasker Foundation. Among his many honors are membership in both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering, recipient of a prestigious Legion of Honor medal from the French National Order, election in 2010 to the French Academy of Medicine, and appointment as chair of innovation at the Collège de France in 2011.