Four members of Johns Hopkins Medicine are among the 100 scholars elected to the National Academy of Medicine. They are Rexford Ahima, Alex Kolodkin, Redonda Miller, and Justin McArthur. Membership in the NAM, part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, is considered one of the highest honors in health and medicine. Ahima is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the schools of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing and director of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism in Johns Hopkins Medicine. Kolodkin is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the School of Medicine and served as deputy director of the school's Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. Miller is president of Johns Hopkins Hospital and associate professor of medicine. McArthur is a professor and director of Neurology at the School of Medicine and the Sheikh Khalifa Stroke Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Five Johns Hopkins PhD students have been named Siebel Scholars for 2021, an award that recognizes them as being among the world's top graduate students in the fields of business, bioengineering, computer science, and energy science. Siebel Scholars receive a financial award of $35,000 to support their final year of studies. The Siebel Scholarship winners from Johns Hopkins are Inês Godet, Bria Macklin, and Alexandra Sneider from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the Whiting School of Engineering; and Yuan Rui and Sarah Somers from the PhD program of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which is shared by the Whiting School and the School of Medicine.
Emily Riehl, an associate professor of mathematics in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, received the 2021 Joan and Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry for her foundational work in category theory and homotopy theory.
Deborah Gross, a professor in the School of Nursing, was named one of Greater Baltimore's top nurses of 2020 by Baltimore magazine in the category of Research. This year's recognition of top nurses, which is based on the magazine's Excellence in Nursing survey, salutes the RN heroes of health care. The 67 nurses chosen include six JHSON alumni in addition to Gross.
Johns Hopkins moved up a spot in two rankings announced in the fall. The university tied with Northwestern and Cal Tech for No. 9 in the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings, after being ranked 10th in four of the past five years. In individual program rankings, Johns Hopkins remained No. 1 overall in biomedical engineering, tied for No. 13 in engineering among universities at which the highest degree offered is a doctorate, and tied for No. 20 in computer science. The university also moved up a spot, to No. 10, in the 2021 U.S. News Best Global University rankings, which this year included nearly 1,500 universities from 86 countries. Among U.S. schools, Johns Hopkins ranked eighth. The university was also ranked No. 12 in the world by Times Higher Education.
Stephen Fried, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in the Krieger School, has received an NIH Director's New Innovator Award from the National Institutes of Health's High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program to continue his studies into the process of protein folding. The award supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators, giving them $1.5 million over five years. The High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program also honored microbiologist Jotham Suez, who received its Early Independence Award. A postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Suez is expected to join the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health as an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology in January.
Mary J. Miller, who served in Senate-confirmed positions in the U.S. Treasury Department from 2010 to 2014 and before that spent 26 years in leadership roles at Baltimore investment firm T. Rowe Price, has been appointed interim senior vice president for finance and administration for Johns Hopkins. Miller was among the candidates for the Democratic nomination for Baltimore mayor earlier this year, finishing third in a field of more than 20 contenders in June's primary. She will remain in her position through the 2020–21 academic year, ensuring a seamless transition as the university searches for a successor to Daniel Ennis, who left the university at the end of September. Ennis had overseen the university's budget, finances, investments, and administrative functions since 2012.
Reza Kalhor, an assistant professor in Biomedical Engineering, a department shared by Medicine and Engineering, and the Center for Epigenetics in the School of Medicine, has been named a Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering. The Packard Fellowship is designed to support unconventional and innovative lines of research by early career scientists and is accompanied by a grant of $875,000 over five years.
Lauren Gardner, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering in the Whiting School, has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine for leading the team that developed a COVID-19 pandemic tracker based on reliable, independent data updated in near-real time. Since the tracker launched in January, it has evolved into the leading source of centralized data on the pandemic.
Sridevi V. Sarma, an associate professor in Biomedical Engineering, a department shared by the School of Medicine and the Whiting School, won $10,000 in Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures' Pitch It On! Competition for female inventors. Sarma received the most votes from the 150 faculty, researchers, and investors who participated in the virtual event held Oct. 20. The competition was the culmination of the AccelHERator, JHTV's yearlong series dedicated to female inventorship at Johns Hopkins. Sarma pitched EZTrack, which creates a heat map of the brain to help doctors determine the source of seizures in drug-resistant epilepsy patients.
Du Yun, a Composition professor at Peabody Conservatory, released a new album, A Cockroach's Tarantella, with the JACK Quartet. In addition, her one-man opera, In Our Daughter's Eyes, has been commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects with funding from OPERA America and is slated to appear in the 2021 Prototype Festival, followed by a West Coast premiere with LA Opera.
Jessica Marie Johnson, an assistant professor in the Department of History in the Krieger School, was named a W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University to work on Dark Codex: History, Blackness, and the Digital.
