As we round the final corner before fall recess, take a minute to catch your breath with some of this week’s scientific discoveries.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa (Kyoto University, Japan), Richard Robson (University of Melbourne, Australia) and Omar M. Yaghi (University of California, Berkeley).
Hop-On Harm Reduction has become a critical site of care for the Middle East neighborhoods of Baltimore. Outside of naloxone, we also provide clean needles and smoking kits, making injection and consumption of drugs safer without guilt and pressure that rehab centers and the general public often propagate.
On Thursday, Oct. 23, the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science hosted Aaron Roth, a professor of computer and cognitive science in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, to give a talk titled "Agreement and Alignment for Human-AI Collaboration."
Crichton’s novel Next acts as an exploration into the ethics of biomedical research, asking the question “to what extent does science serve humanity, and when does it begin to exploit it?” Through a blend of satire and speculative fiction, Crichton crafts a world where innovation and exploitation blur beyond recognition.
This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clarke (University of California, Berkeley), Michel H. Devoret (Yale University and University of California, Santa Barbara) and John M. Martinis (University of California, Santa Barbara) for “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”
Family has always been important to those working in population genetics. When Sohini Ramachandran was a postdoc, the issue of relatives in a dataset causing inaccurate results was considered a major problem in the field. In a Biology Department Seminar held at Mudd Hall on Oct. 9, she expanded upon two of her related research projects describing the analysis of genomic datasets.
On Oct. 8, 2025 the Department of Materials Science and Engineering hosted Yifei Mo for a seminar titled “Computation Accelerated Design and Discovery of Materials for Next-Generation Batteries.”
The lungfish is a rarely studied organism, with scientific implications that extend far beyond its unassuming reputation. On Thursday, Oct. 23 the Biology Department Seminar Series featured Irene Salinas, an evolutionary immunobiologist at the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque who presented her extensive research into the immunobiology of the African lungfish.
IBD research, for all its sophistication, has been searching under the lamppost — sequencing, mapping and quantifying what can be seen. But the key may lie in the park, in the unseen intersections of emotion and biology. Only when medicine expands its scope can it illuminate not just the gut’s inflammation, but the mind’s pain that fuels it.
Winston Timp, the principal investigator of the Timp Lab and associate professor of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at the Whiting School of Engineering and Hopkins School of Medicine, develops tools to read and assemble genes. His primary technique, nanopore sequencing, uses small pores to characterize RNA, DNA and potentially even proteins.
On Sept. 22, 2025, President Donald Trump, alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would be notifying physicians that the use of acetaminophen (Tylenol) by expectant mothers can be associated with a “very increased risk of autism.” This announcement has been met with widespread criticism from the scientific community.
Jason McLellan (Hopkins BCMB Ph.D. ‘09), a professor of molecular biosciences and the Welch Chair in Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin, had worked to resolve the structure of a coronavirus spike protein in 2016, years before the pandemic began.
In an interview with The News-Letter, sophomore Angelina Dong recounted her experiences as an University 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
On Sept. 18, Valentina Cigliola, an assistant professor from Vanderbilt University’s Department of Pharmacology, presented her talk titled “Innate Mechanisms of Spinal Cord Regeneration,” hosted by Assistant Professor of Biology at Hopkins Erin Jimenez.
Thelma Escobar presented at the JHU Department of Biology’s Seminar Series on Thursday, September 25th, 2025. She discussed fascinating progress her lab has recently made regarding chromatin modifications in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and the adaptive immune system.
