Kent Calder, director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies and director of Japan Studies at SAIS, was presented with the Order of the Rising Sun on behalf of the emperor and prime minister of Japan during a ceremony at the Japanese embassy. Calder was honored for his contributions to Japan studies in the United States.
Paul Rothman, dean of the School of Medicine and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Peter Pronovost, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine, have been named to Modern Healthcare's list of the 100 Most Influential People in Healthcare. Dawnielle Farrar-Gaines and Nykia Jackson, of the Applied Physics Laboratory, received 2014 Women of Color Technology Awards. Farrar-Gaines, a senior electrical and materials engineer in the Research and Exploratory Development Department, received a Technical Innovation–Industry award. Jackson, an engineer in the Asymmetric Operations Sector, was selected as a 2014 Technology Rising Star. Brice Ménard, an assistant professor in Physics and Astronomy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, received a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering, given to early-career scientists and engineers. The honor brings a five-year, $875,000 award. Collin Broholm, a professor of physics and astronomy in the Krieger School, is one of 19 scientists nationwide to be selected as Moore Experimental Investigators in Quantum Materials. Broholm will receive $1.8 million over five years to fund his research based on neutron scattering. Pediatric surgeon and scientist David Hackam is the new pediatric surgeon-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. He will work closely with pediatrician-in-chief George Dover to oversee clinical operations at the center. Hackam will direct not only general pediatric surgery but also several surgical subspecialties. The Krieger School's Homewood Art Workshops has a new name: the Center for Visual Arts. The center celebrated its 40th anniversary in October with a Plein Air Paint Out, where close to 50 artists created artworks at outdoor locations around campus. Huntington "Skip" Sheldon, Med '56, a longtime university trustee, committed $15 million to the School of Medicine's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. Part of the gift will go toward a facility for electron cryomicroscopy, a technique that allows researchers to study biological structures at the level of individual molecules. In the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of best colleges, Johns Hopkins remains 12th, maintaining for a second year its highest placement in the past 15 editions of the guide. In a separate U.S. News ranking with different criteria, Johns Hopkins was named the 11th best university in the world. The Krieger School was awarded a four-year, $960,000 Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a new Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Initiative. Chris Beyrer, a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Daniel Drachman, a professor in the School of Medicine, are among the 70 new members from the United States elected to the Institute of Medicine. Also elected to the IOM is Joshua Sharfstein, who will become the Bloomberg School's new associate dean for public health practice and training in January. Leslie Ford Weber has been appointed director of the Montgomery County Campus and of Government and Community Affairs for Montgomery County. Weber replaced Elaine Amir, who retired in September 2013. The Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust honored Daniel J. O'Shaughnessy, guidance and control subsystem lead engineer at APL on the Messenger spacecraft, with the first Heinlein Award for his development of a technique that employs solar panels as sails and guides a spacecraft without using its rocket propulsion system. Richard Huganir, director of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience in the School of Medicine, has received the Goldman-Rakic Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. The $40,000 award recognizes contributions that may provide new insights into psychiatric and neurological disease. A ribbon-cutting ceremony in September opened the new Centre Street Performance Studio at the Peabody Institute, which gives students a venue where they can get hands-on experience producing and promoting their own programming ideas. The School of Nursing reports that with the addition of six new inductees, 43 percent of its full-time faculty members are fellows of the American Academy of Nursing. The new members are Associate Professors Joan Kub, Hayley Mark, Sarah Szanton, and Elizabeth "Ibby" Tanner; and Assistant Professors Jill Hamilton and Nancy Hodgson. A $136,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will enable the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum to make available online its entire collection of more than 10,000 museum objects. Jordan Green, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which is shared by the schools of Medicine and Engineering was named to the "Brilliant Ten" list of Popular Science. Green uses biodegradable particles to teach the immune system to recognize cancer cells. Carey Priebe, a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics in the Whiting School, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research, a program that supports President Obama's BRAIN Initiative. Grant recipients get $300,000 over a two-year period. Also awarded a grant from the BRAIN Initiative are neuroimaging scientists at Johns Hopkins and the University of Copenhagen, whose teams received a three-year, $1.5 million grant to develop transformative brain imaging. The team leaders from Johns Hopkins are Arman Rahmin, a chief physicist and imaging expert in the School of Medicine and the Whiting School of Engineering, and Dean F. Wong, a professor in Medicine, Public Health, and the Carey Business School. A team of biomedical engineering undergraduates placed second in the 2014 Collegiate Inventors Competition. The Hopkins team invented AccuSpine, a probe designed to improve spinal fusion surgery by providing real-time feedback for accurate surgical screw placement. Johns Hopkins joined the BorrowDirect consortium this summer, giving JHU faculty, staff, and students access to the more than 50 million volumes held by consortium members. Users have the ability to search and request materials from across the 11 institutions' libraries without going through interlibrary loan.
