Johns Hopkins announces funding for Washington, D.C.-based events, projects

Thirty-eight convening, research, and teaching endeavors based at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., have been selected to receive funding from the university's Nexus Awards Program over the next year.

The projects span every academic division of the university and include nearly 150 scholars exploring a range of topics, including bird flu preparedness, improving primary care, AI-enhanced health care, and global humanitarian food assistance.

This is the third round of funding distributed via the Nexus Awards, a $15 million program designed to support research, teaching, and event programming at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, which officially opened in the fall of 2023. Funding for award recipients begins July 1.

"Since 2023, faculty from across our One University have harnessed Nexus Awards to bring our Hopkins Bloomberg Center to life as a hub of robust debate and dialogue," said Ron Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University. "We are grateful to sustain this tradition with a third cohort of Nexus Awards recipients, who will continue to mobilize ideas, expertise, and insights to help address society's most challenging concerns."

Nexus Awards are available in three categories:

• Convening: Convening teams may request up to $100,000, with an award term of up to one year for the development and execution of an academic or policy-focused conference or a series of conferences on any topic. These may be one-time events or a series of related events.

• Research: Research teams may request up to $300,000, with an award term of up to two years focusing on either a new area of collaborative work or an expansion of an ongoing area of collaborative work in fundamental, clinical, or applied research, or projects within the arts and humanities. Proposals may include an external, D.C.-based partner, and cross-disciplinary work is encouraged.

• Teaching: Teaching applicants may request up to $25,000 (renewable for two years) for undergraduate or graduate courses or co-curricular opportunities. While single faculty members may apply, courses that span multiple departments, schools, or divisions are encouraged.

"The Nexus Awards are a powerful catalyst for innovative scholarship and teaching, amplifying the extraordinary talent and creativity of our faculty," Provost Ray Jayawardhana said. "I'm eager to see how this year's awardees will harness the dynamic setting of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center to extend the reach of their ideas, bringing Hopkins expertise and insight to the forefront of vital national conversations."

Over the past year, the Nexus Awards have supported a range of offerings at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, including conversations about democracy on college campuses, the effectiveness of economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool, the future of health care delivery, the fragmenting global economy, and policies to address mental health and addiction in the U.S., among many others.

"The Nexus Awards support a rapidly growing pipeline that connects our communities in Baltimore and Washington," said Lainie Rutkow, executive vice provost. "Through these awards, our faculty are integrating the opportunities afforded by the Hopkins Bloomberg Center into the broader fabric of JHU."

In this round, four Nexus awards are receiving additional support from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health, for transdisciplinary research and convenings focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of human disruptions to Earth's natural systems on human health. Those projects are denoted with an asterisk below.

The application period for a new round of funding will open later this year, with proposals due in late February.

Nexus Awards recipients for 2025 are:

Convening

• Optimizing Primary Care: Enhancing Health Outcomes, Efficiency, and Cost Savings Amid Local Weather-Related Health Challenges: Sonia Angell, Eliana Perrin, Lisa Cooper, Sarah Conway, Cheryl Dennison Himmelfarb, Dan Polsky
• Sustaining the Gains of Childhood Vaccination in an Uncertain Climate: Andrea Carcelen, William Moss, Shaun Truelove, Lauren Gardner
• Using International Cooperation in Weather Forecasting as a Model for Global Disease Modeling and Forecasting: Alison Kelly, Caitlin Rivers, Sutyajeet Soneja, Alexandra Phelan
• Strengthening Monitoring and Measurement for Scaling Antenatal Multiple Micronutrient Supplementation (MMS) Programs: Rebecca Heidkamp, Shelley Walton, Ellina Wood, Melinda Munos
• Re-Imagining the Research Agenda for Humanitarian Food Assistance within a Changing Global Health and Nutrition Landscape: Emily Keats, Shelley Walton, Hannah Tappis, Shannon Doocy, Parul Christian, Andrew Thorne-Lyman, Martin Bloem
• Strategies to Improve Shared Care between Family Caregivers and the Paid Direct Care Workforce: Chanee Fabius, Katherine Miller, Katherine Ornstein, Nancy Schoenborn, Jennifer Wolff
• Acting on Opportunity: Mainstreaming Personal Agency Approaches for Adult Learning and Skilling: Anita Shankar, Brian Gunia, Hannah Fritz
• Safer Roads, Healthier Planet: Advancing Sustainable Mobility for Global Wellbeing: Abdulgafoor Bachani, Samuel Myers, Simon Obi, James Kumwenda *
• Serving the Community: How Nonprofit Hospital Tax Exemptions Foster Hospital Community Benefits: Hossein Zare, Ge Bai
• Beloved Birth 50 by 50: Advancing Community Midwifery through Policy and Action: Kaytura Felix, Keshia Pollack Porter
• Johns Hopkins H5N1 Influenza Preparedness and Response Forum: Gigi Gronvall, Arturo Casadevall, Meghan Davis, Andy Pekosz, Tara Kirk Sell, Erin Sorrell, Anne Barnhill
• Shaping the Future of Medicare Advantage: Policy, Innovation, and Markets: Daniel Polsky, Kali Thomas, Amit Jain, Melinda Buntin
• Responsible AI for Health Symposium (RAIHS) at HBC: Ritu Agarwal, Rama Chellappa, Mark Dredze, Gordon Gao, Kadija Ferryman, Emily Haroz, Brian Hasselfeld, Risa Wolf
• American Democracy as Political History: Challenges Across the Past, Present, and Future: Leah Wright Rigueur
• Developing Connections and Partnerships to Prepare Future Educators as Change Leaders in Inclusive Undergraduate STEM Teaching and Learning: Mike Reese, Kelly Clark
• Civic Discussions on Reality-Distorting Technologies: Christopher Honey, Janice Chen, Kishore Kuchibhotla, Tom Lippincott, Hale Sirin, Frederick Barrett
• AI as a Participant in Democratic Deliberation: Exploring the Future of Convenings: Sig Libowitz, Andrew Perrin, Jason Eisner, Graham Sack, Amar Bakshi
• National Symphony Orchestra: Peabody Master Class: Marin Alsop, Andrew Kipe
• The Political Determinants of Health: Jeremy Shiffman, Yusra Shawar
• The Advancing Research on Conflict Annual Conference: Sarah Parkinson, Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Consuelo Amat, Angie Bautista-Chauvez
• Restorative Pedagogy in STEM Classrooms: A Delphi Convening to Establish Best Practices: Olivia Marcucci, Rebecca Cruz, Odis Johnson
• The HEAT Corps Initiative: Promising Strategies to Mitigate Contemporary Youth Public Health Challenges: Panagis Galiatsatos, Annette Anderson, Catherine Ling, Jennifer Ross, Mindi Levin, Natalie Exum
• Transforming Measurement to Drive Quality Outcomes and Reduce Costs: Providers, Payors, and Policymakers, and Patient Aligned in Care Transformation (PACT): Laura Sigman, Pamela Johnson, Dan Polsky, Kathy McDonald, Danielle Gerry, Peter Hill, Allen Kachalia, Donald Liss
• Proposal for the Development and Execution of a One-Time Workshop on Machine Learning/AI in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Research Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine: Jeffrey Rothstein
• Humans in an Autonomous and Robotic World: Exploring and Enabling Human-Machine Partnerships for Sustained Deep-Space Presence Including Moon and Mars: Mark Shelhamer, Peter Kazanzides, Charles Hibbitts, Alicia Carey, John Gersh, Robert Wilson, Amy Haufler, Tinoosh Mohsenin
• Closing the Global Health Research-to-Access Gap: Richard Chaisson, Caleb Alexander, Nancy Kass, Ge Bai
• Climate Change and Childhood Obesity: Identifying Linkages and Shared Solutions: Eliana Perrin, Erin Hager, Sonia Angell, Sara Johnson, Benjamin Zaitchik, Angela Suarez, Rachel Deitch *
• The Power of Midwifery: Building a Midwifery Workforce Policy Roadmap to Transform Maternal Health in the DMV: Ashley Gresh, Noelene Jeffers, Jamie Swietlikowski, Jessica Angelson
• The Return of Independent Primary Care Practices: A Solution to the American Primary Care Crisis: Olga Yakusheva, Eric Bass, Lusine Poghosyan, Daniel Polsky, Barak Richman
• AI-Enabled Synthetic Biology and Biosecurity: Joel Bader
• From Laboratory to Launchpad: Transition Pathways for Climate Science and Energy IP: Corey Oses, Avi Bregman, Steven Cohen, Jonah Erlebacher *

Research

• Exposome-Driven Precision Medicine: Bridging Research, Practice and Policy for Better Healthcare: Fenna Sille, Lesliam Quiros-Alcala, Kate Fitzgerald, Thomas Hartung, Paul Locke, Kirsten Koehler, Ana Rule, Keeve Nachman, Aparna Balasubramanian, Gurumurthy Ramachandran, Meredith McCormack, Alexandra Maertens, Meghan Davis, Sarah Preheim, Carsten Prasse, Peter DeCarlo, Thomas Pisanic *
• CLIMB Higher: Addressing Mental Health Through Policy Partnership for Economic Mobility: Catherine Ettman, Andrew Anderson, Laura Samuel
• Embedding Neighborhood Nursing in U.S. Health Policy Systems: A Co-Design Approach to Visualize Health Policy Gaps, Opportunities, and Pathways for Equitable Health Systems Design: Andre Nogueira, Sarah Szanton, Kathy McDonald, Daniel Polsky, Vincent Guilamo-Ramos, Natalia Barolin
• Project INTERSECT: Building a Coalition for Energy Affordable and Community-Responsive Data Center Expansion: Benjamin Link, Abe Silverman, Magdalena Klemun, Yury Dvorkin, Benjamin Zaitchik

Teaching

• Combating Misinformation by Leveraging AI Training Tools in an Era of Science-Denialism: Prativa Baral, Joshua Sharfstein, Meghan McGinty, Vishal Patel, David Toia, Patti Anderson, Kathy Gresh
• Medicine, Science, and Conflict: Soha Bayoumi, Nicole Labturo, Ahmed Ragab, Lauren Reynolds
• Data Analytics and Policy Hackathon: Collin Paschall, Christopher Kromphardt

∗ - denotes projects receiving additional support from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health