With Thanksgiving approaching, we can all take a moment to be grateful for the beauty of scientific discovery. This week has brought images from the Euclid Space Telescope, biological chimeras and yet another superconductivity controversy.
On Tuesday, Nov. 7, the Johns Hopkins Health Policy Forum invited Chairman, CEO and President of Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) Tom Polen to share his insights into the current state of global health care and BD’s role in it. Polen was joined by Dean of Carey Business School Alex Triantis.
Aimon Rahman, a third-year doctoral student in the Vision & Image Understanding (VIU) Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, is making significant contributions to the field of medical artificial intelligence (AI). In her Hopkins Engineering Applications and Research Tutorials (HEART) course titled "Introduction to Deep Learning for Medical Imaging," Rahman introduces students to the practical applications of computer vision in medical image analysis.
In everyday life, we all make choices based on the information available to us. These decisions range from life-changing acts to the minutiae of existence. The question we answer, consciously or not, is whether or not we have enough data on which to act, or if we need to gain more information before doing so. This question is called the explore/exploit trade-off.
As we enter the November stretch of the semester, researchers around the world are also working hard to advance efforts that can be beneficial to human health. This week’s science news highlights endeavors to understand various health challenges and identify treatments to combat them.
On Friday, Oct. 27, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering hosted a seminar featuring Executive Director of Development Engineering and Chemistry Process Development at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) Jean Tom, an accomplished chemical engineer with a distinguished career in the pharmaceutical industry. The seminar provided students with insights into entering the workforce and addressing challenges in their careers.
The Public Health Student Forum (PHSF) held an open discussion on environmental safety and sustainability in Baltimore on Oct. 29. The event featured a conversation on the efficacy of Hopkins composting, water safety in light of the recent Cryptosporidium contamination, how institutions can build trust with the Baltimore community and the importance of engaging in local politics.
I opened the incubator door, and a familiar whiff of an earthy, repulsive odor attacked my nostrils. I held my breath and slowly took out a stack of yellow gel plates covered with small white dots. This could be the day, I hoped to myself. This was just another round of mutation screening, trying to find that one special bacterial colony with that one specific mutation that could prove our hypothesis.
The Department of Biology hosted a seminar on Thursday, Oct. 26 featuring Alison Xie, an assistant research professor of surgery-urology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The talk, titled “Glial-Neuron Interactions in Sensory Ganglia Alleviate the Symptoms of Chronic Pain in Mice,” discussed Xie’s research on how Gq-GPCR activation in satellite glial cells (SGCs) of the sensory ganglia can produce analgesic effects in mouse models.
Nilanjan Chatterjee, a professor of biostatistics and genetic epidemiology at the School of Medicine and also recognized as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, collaborated on a machine-learning model that would improve the predictive ability of polygenic risk scores in non-European populations. This research, a collaboration with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Haoyu Zhang from the National Cancer Institute, was recently published in Nature Genetics.
It’s spooky season, and the following scientific findings sure are a treat! Scientific news this week ranges from as microscopic as gut microbiome to as macroscopic as Mars.
As we hop back into school after Fall Break, let’s review some of the biggest headlines in science. This week features stories about malaria vaccines, weight loss drugs, gravitational wave observations and lithium-ion batteries.
Rajiv McCoy, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, and his collaborators at London Women’s Clinic in the U.K. discovered a strong correlation between chromosome abnormalities, embryo arrest and low blastocyst morphological grading of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) of human preimplantation embryos. Their results were recently published in Genome Medicine.
Orion Weller is a third-year doctoral student affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) advised by Benjamin Van Durme and Dawn Lawrie. He is currently teaching a Hopkins Engineering Applications and Research Tutorials (HEART) course titled Reasoning with ChatGPT in which he discusses the contexts and relevance of his research.
On Thursday, Oct. 12, Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at Northwestern University Sadie Wignall shared her findings on the mechanisms oocytes employ to regulate spindles without centrosomes during meiosis.
Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Creighton University Nathan Pennington delivered a guest lecture to Ex Numera, the undergraduate mathematics club, on Oct. 9. It was their third speaker of the semester. The talk, titled “Why You Should Take Differential Equations,” discussed the issues with typical first-semester differential equations courses in comparison to what the topic looks like.
On October 7, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR) celebrated the 13th anniversary of the Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture, a symposium of lectures related to the lasting legacy of Henrietta Lacks, the ethical implications of her treatment by Hopkins and the future of clinical research.
While taking the class Cognitive Neuroscience with Professor Mick Bonner in my freshman year, I heard my future PI Dr. Elisabeth Marsh present the five guiding principles she employs while working at the intersection of stroke research and clinical medicine. I joined the Marsh Lab soon after. While I was interested in learning more about stroke, I did not understand the true complexities of the disease until the fall of 2022, when my grandpa suffered from a stroke.
In the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM) special seminar series on Oct 3., Assistant Professor at the Integrated Mathematical Oncology Department at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute Renee Brady shared insights on using minimally invasive biomarkers to predict treatment responses.
In a groundbreaking development, a team of Hopkins researchers has unveiled an innovation in HIV therapy that promises to transform the lives of individuals with the virus. This research, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, offers a novel method to maintain clinically sufficient drug levels through an injectable solution that autonomously forms into a hydrogel.
