Science news in review: October 28
As we push through the fall semester, take a minute to learn about some of the recent discoveries and developments in drug discovery, quantum computing and cancer treatment.
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of jhunewsletter.com - The Johns Hopkins News-Letter's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query.
1000 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
As we push through the fall semester, take a minute to learn about some of the recent discoveries and developments in drug discovery, quantum computing and cancer treatment.
In an interview with The News-Letter, sophomore Angelina Dong recounted her experiences as a Woodrow Wilson Undergraduate Research Fellow at the Hoke lab under Dr. Ahmet Hoke at the Hopkins School of Medicine. Currently majoring in Neuroscience and Medicine, Science and the Humanities, Dong joined her research lab in the September of her freshman year. Her project is titled “MAP4K4 Inhibition as a Promising Treatment for Chemo-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy: Effects of MAP4K4 Inhibition on Paclitaxel Antineoplastic Capabilities.”
On Thursday, Oct. 9 the Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) hosted a Q&A with Christopher K. Haddock and Andrew Kolodny about their team’s recent publication: “Imagine the Possibilities Pain Coalition and Opioid Marketing to Veterans: Lessons for Military and Veterans Healthcare.” OIDA, which is co-created by Hopkins and University of California, San Francisco, won the Society of American Archivists Archival Innovation Award.
The Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) hosted its annual symposium on Thursday, Oct. 16. The symposium opened with remarks from Alex Szalay – Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Big Data and Director of IDIES – on the rapid evolution of data science and its expanding applications. Over the past 25 years, many scientific breakthroughs have emerged from unique data sets, including the mapping of the entire human genome through the Human Genome Project and the imaging of the universe and celestial bodies via the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
Nihar Shah, an accomplished artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, delivered a seminar at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) on October 10th titled “LLMs in Science, the good, the bad and the ugly.” The seminar purveyed the role of AI in scientific research and peer review.
Thelma Escobar, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, presented at the Hopkins Department of Biology’s Seminar Series on Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. She discussed the progress her lab has recently made regarding chromatin modifications in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and the adaptive immune system.
On Oct. 4, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) hosted the 15th Annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture, a commemoration that united science, ethics and remembrance under one name that transformed medicine.
As the semester starts to pick up, take a minute and read the latest scientific discoveries that have occurred within the past couple of weeks.
On Tuesday, Sept. 30, Professor Hey-Kyoung Lee from the Department of Neuroscience at Hopkins presented her research as the speaker of the Ru Chih Huang Department of Biology Colloquium Series.
What’s striped, native to Southeast Asia and regrows spinal neurons in under 10 weeks?
Shea Littlepage is a public health researcher and Fulbright-Fogarty Public Health Fellowship recipient. She is dedicated to advancing global health through qualitative research and providing valuable insights to public health agencies. In an interview with The News-Letter, Shea discussed how her experiences at Hopkins motivated her to study health decision-making among Ethiopian experts during the COVID-19 crisis. These experiences have reinforced her commitment to combatting public health challenges through international outreach and policy analysis.
Toby Mao is a first-year MD candidate at Stanford and a Fulbright recipient passionate about interdisciplinary approaches to medicine, integrating medical engineering, technology and preventative healthcare. In an interview with The News-Letter, Toby reflected on how his background and passion for global health inspired him to pursue the Fulbright Program, which has shaped his commitment to using artificial intelligence for healthcare innovation.
Universities have eternally been celebrated as hubs for new research and discoveries: institutions at the frontier of acquiring and disseminating knowledge whether through classrooms, labs or seminars. However, it is equally important to consider how this knowledge and resources could benefit wider communities.
The Department of Biology’s Fall 2025 Seminar Series opened with a packed house on Thursday, Sept. 11 as Simon Alberti, a professor in the Department of Cellular Biochemistry at the Technical University of Dresden, delivered a talk titled “Biomolecular condensates: molecular insights and implications for disease intervention.”
“When I first did the hearing experiment on mice, it was so straightforward — I could see the connection right away between what we were testing and the bigger picture of hearing loss,” Kate Xie shared in an interview with The News-Letter. As a senior double majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Writing Seminars, Xie is involved in research investigating hearing loss and neural pathways involved with it.
How do brains turn environmental inputs into motor outputs?
Laboratory workshops, collaborative or independent projects, community events and personal fulfillment — Agara Bio brings it all together.
During the COVID lockdown in his gap year at the Technical University of Munich, Hopkins senior Alexander Kim started development of what would become the haptic communication device. He is currently working toward a combined Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s in Robotics, and he is in the late stages of patenting his device through Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV). In an interview with The News-Letter, Kim described his journey developing his idea and the patent process.
Artificial intelligence-based protein structure prediction and protein design tools have revolutionized structural biology. Chief among these tools is AlphaFold, which was developed by researchers at Google DeepMind and recently won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. AlphaFold was trained on existing protein structures, which makes it extremely proficient at predicting the structure of stable proteins with well-characterized domains. However, it struggles with predicting the structures of misfolded proteins and intrinsically disordered domains, which are prevalent in many degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and cystic fibrosis. Therefore, it is crucial to study how proteins related in these diseases misfold in order to understand the pathologies and develop treatments and cures for these diseases.
Erin Sutton, flight dynamics model validation lead for NASA’s Dragonfly mission, visited to the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics on Sept. 10 to share her work on the Dragonfly, a car-sized rotorcraft whose goal is to fly through the methane-rich atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. The seminar highlighted the challenges of validating flight dynamics for Titan’s environment, a notoriously hazy, treacherous terrain, and how Sutton’s team continues to push the boundaries of aerospace engineering and planetary exploration.