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The magazine of The Johns hopkins WhiTing school of engineering sUmmer 2009

how researchers are mining immense amounts of data to find that elusive nugget of gold.

MODERN PROSPECTORS

n May 31, 2009, Nereus, a hybrid, remotely operated submarine dove 10,902 meters

into the Mariana Trench and gathered images and samples from one of the world’s last remaining

frontiers. The dive made Nereus the world’s deepest-diving vehicle and marked the start of a new

era in deep-sea exploration.

Back in Baltimore, the Whiting School community was thrilled to hear of the expedition’s

success. After all, the project’s co-principal investigator, Louis Whitcomb, is one of ours—a profes-

sor of mechanical engineering at WSE. Along with his graduate students and colleagues from the

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Louis developed the sub’s navigation and control system.

Reading about Nereus, I realized that the kind of science fiction that fueled my imagination

as a child is now taking place at WSE. Every day, our faculty “explore strange new worlds” (such as

studying cell detachment at the subcellular level—research at the Institute for NanoBioTechnology)

and “boldly go where no man has gone before” (including the work of professors James Spicer,

Kevin Hemker, research engineer Denis Nagle, and Takeru Igusa with the Applied Physics Lab,

who are developing materials and design criteria for the Solar Probe’s 2015 mission to

the sun’s corona). And the prosthetics that professors Alison Okamura, Ralph Etienne-

Cummings, and Nitish Thakor are working on prove that we do, indeed, “have the

technology” to make people “better, stronger, faster.” What’s happening in our labs and

classrooms is fantastic—both wonderful and almost unbelievable.

I’m also happy to report that student applications and acceptances remain

strong. We again had a record-breaking number of applicants whose qualifications are

the highest in the school’s history. Graduate admissions are as competitive as ever,

including in our new master’s programs in Financial Mathematics, Engineering Management, and

Bioengineering Innovation and Design.

Providing financial aid at a competitive level remains a Whiting School priority and this

spring, President Ronald Daniels stated his commitment to making a Johns Hopkins education

accessible to all students, regardless of their financial means. He is working with the Homewood

deans to achieve this goal. Already, the Whiting School has committed to a 50 percent tuition

grant to any Hopkins undergraduate or alumnus pursuing a full-time master’s degree at the Whiting

School (see p. 5).

Though the year’s economic news has been far from rosy, we are weathering the storm. I

am confident that with your continued dedication and leadership, we will emerge from this period

even stronger than before. On behalf of our students, faculty, and staff I want to thank you for your

support of the Whiting School of Engineering and wish you a wonderful summer.

Best wishes,

Nicholas P. Jones

Benjamin T. Rome Dean, Whiting School of Engineering

O

JOHNS HOPkiNS ENGiNEERiNG

Editorial Staff

Sue De PasqualeConsulting Editor

Abby LattesExecutive Editor

Royce FaddisCreative Director, Marketing and Creative Services

Rob Spiller Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Relations

Kimberly WillisAssociate Director of Development and Alumni Relations

Contributing Writers: Sarah Achenbach, Erin Baggett, Elizabeth Heubeck, Tiras Lin, Mary Beth Regan, Greg Rienzi, MA ’02 (A&S), Angela Roberts, MA ’05 (A&S), Joel Shurkin, Nick Zagorski

Contributing Photographers: Will Kirk ’99 (A&S), Jay T. VanRensselaer

Johns Hopkins Engineering magazine is published twice annually by the Whiting School of Engineering Office of Marketing and Communications. We encourage your comments and feedback. Please contact us at:

Abby Lattes ([email protected])Director of Marketing and CommunicationsWhiting School of Engineering 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218Phone: (410) 516-6852engineering.jhu.edu

from The Dean Explore the dynamic, online

version of Johns Hopkins

Engineering magazine at

http://eng.jhu.edu/wse

/magazine-summer-09

and Stay connected.

JOHNs HOpkiNs ENGiNEERiNG sUMMER 2009 1

DEPARTMENTS from the Dean

from our reaDers 2

r+D The Latest Research and Developments from the Whiting School 3 Transforming the world of consumer electronics … going up? … a model

for better glaucoma treatment … when college was serious business …

and more

a+L Alumni and Leadership Making an Impact 28An investment in the future … solutions for at-risk pregnancies … reliving

Reunion and Homecoming 2009 … green career options … and more

fInaL eXam An intrepid student team of “Recyclists” shows its pluck

in the 11th annual Kinetic Sculpture Race. 36

fEATuRES

Modern Prospectors 12In a quest similar to that of the ’49ers of times past, today’s researchers are mining

immense mounds of data—in disciplines ranging from computational biology to

structural topology optimization—to find that elusive nugget of gold. By Nick Zagorski

A Glimpse Into the Future of Medicine 20Inside the Whiting School’s new mock operating room, engineers, surgeons, and

computer scientists are pushing the limits of surgical robotics to find safer, more

effective surgical treatments for patients. By Mary Beth Regan

Getting to Know You 22We bring you a sampling of admissions essays—heartfelt, revealing, and sometimes

quirky—from five students who will join the Whiting School’s freshman class in

September.

In thIs Issue summer 2009 VoLume 7 no. 2 9

20

36

2 JOHNs HOpkiNs ENGiNEERiNG sUMMER 2009

from our reaDers

“Beastly” recollections I enjoyed “The Evolution of Robotics” in the winter issue [p. 7] on current progress in robotics at Hopkins. Just wanted to call out one inaccuracy in the article where it assumes robotics at the Whiting School traces back to the 1990s.

Assuming the Applied Physics Laboratory at Laurel is considered part of the Whiting School, there may be a longer history for robot-ics than indicated in the article. When I was working on my master’s in computer science at APL back in 1981–85, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Sigilito at APL. He related to me the history of the “Hopkins Beast,” which was a robot that looked a bit like R2D2 from Star Wars and inhabited the basement of a labo-ratory building. This early robot had a limited vision capability that allowed it to identify spe-cially designed electrical outlets in the basement area. This allowed the robot to move about on its own and when its charge fell below a certain level it would look for an outlet to recharge itself. After charging it would continue to wan-der about the basement using its limited artifi-cial intelligence and vision capability.

Greg Chirikjian’s robot is certainly light-years ahead of the “Hopkins Beast.”

Rod Summerford, MCS ’85Columbia, MD

What about nuclear?I want to compliment “The Terawatt Challenge” by Mike Field in the winter issue, and especially the [sidebar] “Dead Calm, Dark Night.” I found the article to be technically interesting, but it failed to state (except indi-rectly) that a major part of the energy supply problem requires meeting the demand for elec-tricity on that single peak day of the year. The article did discuss the problems of storing elec-tricity during off-peak hours, but it did not state that meeting the expected peak demands of the future will certainly require the installa-tion of new power plants to carry the electric load when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. For me, this omission had a negative effect on the value of the article.

There was no mention that Hopkins might also support the

idea of installing the most environmentally friendly type of power plant: nuclear. Hopkins alumni have been supporting nuclear power plants in the past—why not the future? I, for one, studied under Professor A.G. Christie and was awarded the master of science in engi-neering from Hopkins in 1950, and was a key member of the team that designed and built the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, which has been supplying huge quantities of reliable and safe electricity since 1973, and hasn’t emitted a single ounce of carbon dioxide during the entire period (except, of course, CO2 from the small heating boiler). In addition, Hopkins professor of environmental health and sanitary engineer-ing John C. Geyer provided material support during the design phase.

Robert W. Davies, MS ’50Cockeysville, MD

fuel for thoughtI would like to congratulate Mike Field and Johns Hopkins Engineering magazine on the thoughtful and interesting article “The Terawatt Challenge” [Winter, 2009].

While fuel cells have potential efficiencies of 60 percent as noted, current generation cells require ultra-pure hydrogen to avoid rapid cell deterioration. This exacerbates the efficiency losses inherent in the current hydrogen produc-tion technology. Over 90 percent of deliberately produced hydrogen in the U.S. comes from steam reforming of methane (SMR). Almost all is used in petroleum refining and fertilizer (ammonia) manufacture and is typically pro-duced at 95–99 percent purity level, with a thermal efficiency of 60–65 percent. This leads to an overall efficiency of 35–40 percent in a fuel cell system. Raising hydrogen purity to the five-nines level likely would reduce production efficiency. The entire energy train deserves attention.

Mr. Field noted that improvements in fuel cell electrode catalysts that greatly reduce plati-num requirements are generally seen as central to bringing fuel cell costs into an economically via-

ble range. This seems an area where the broader resources of the university, particularly in surface chemistry, may be criti-cal to the prospects for any breakthrough advance in technology.

The effort by Professor Meneveau and others to understand the subtle, but potentially troublesome, environmental consequences of large-scale wind turbine deployment is to be applauded. Early coal-based power plants were not a major environmental concern; they were few and sparsely distributed. Massive deploy-ment of wind turbines has the potential for unfortunate and unforeseen environmental consequences. Seeking to understand such phe-nomena early on is a very worthwhile endeavor.

In addition to the “Dead Calm, Dark Night” dispatch issues raised, transmission remains a major impediment to both wind- and solar-based electric power. While this has been largely viewed as dominated by rights-of-way and financial constraints, EPRI, DOE, and others have noted that major improvements in transmission efficiency and grid management are needed to facilitate the economic transmis-sion of power from the remote areas favorable for generation to the densely populated areas that are the major load centers. It is unclear whether grid and transmission technology match interests and expertise within the Whiting School, but it is clearly part of the enabling technology suite for solar and wind power.

The transition from the power system we have, both in the U.S. and globally, and the more sustainable system we hope to have is fraught with challenges. Central generation sta-tions are some of the longest-lived and most expensive infrastructure we possess. I remember visiting the BG&E Wagner Station as an undergraduate in the early 60s. It was then a young, but not new, facility. With environmen-tal add-ons, it is still in service; such longevity is not atypical. Carbon management that can both de-rate existing plants and reduce their efficiency, and a possible PHEV automotive fleet could have major impacts on the electrical grid and the need for new generating capacity, whatever the technology employed. This area is deserving of far more attention than it has received and could be a fruitful arena for joint work between the Whiting School and the business school.

David K. Schmalzer ’64, MS ’65, PhD, PE Director Fossil Energy Program

Argonne National Laboratory (retired)

teLL us What You thInK at [email protected]


T h e l a T e s T r e s e a r c h a n d d e v e l o p m e n T s From The Wh i T ing school—and beyon d

Transforming the World of Consumer ElectronicsThe golden grail of image processing is getting the most amount of information in the least amount of “space.” That means you try to cram as many visual details into the smallest amount of 0s and 1s as possible. Given a fixed bit bud-get (file size), the more faithful the details, the better the picture.

The Hopkins Digital Signal Processing Laboratory, headed by Trac D. Tran, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has developed algo-rithms that can greatly improve both still pictures, such as the familiar JPEG format on web pages, and digital video, like the MPEG format on DVD. Tran and his group specialize in transformation—a mathematical mapping that converts raw image/video pixels into a much terser, sparser representation, leading to improved compression efficiency. You probably carry one of Tran’s algorithms in either your cell phone or your Blu-ray Disc player.

Tran and colleagues have also produced a family of transformation for video, one that is currently represented in most smart phones. Tran’s transform algorithms allow the video data to be processed within a 16-bit architecture, which while fairly crude for a contemporary computer is perfect for small, hand-held devices like Apple iPhones and iPods. Those gadgets require something that will not suck up battery power and are small enough to fit in the hand. “My group pioneered this line of research 10 years ago,” says Tran.

Now he and his team are poised to see their newest technological wizardry unveiled—in an

application expected to take the consumer world by storm.

The current international standard for still images is JPEG, which is the default image for-mat in most digital cameras. The problem with JPEG lies in its 20-year-old technology. A new image compression algorithm and file format developed by Microsoft, called HD Photo, is expected to become the next international image standard later this year under the name JPEG XR (XR stands for extended range, stressing its ability to handle high-quality, high-dynamic-range images). The technology already is available in Windows Vista and the upcom-ing Windows 7. JPEG XR delivers a com-pressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size. It is, Tran says, as hardware-friendly as JPEG and likely to wind up in a camera near you.

At the heart of JPEG XR is a fast lossless-mapping transform developed in Tran’s DSP

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Lab, based on the concept of what he calls “pre-filtering” and “post-filtering,” which improves compression efficiency while retaining most practical features of the original JPEG.

“One advantage that the JPEG XR trans-form offers is the lossless coding capability, so you don’t lose anything if you don’t want to,” Tran says. “When people buy high-end cameras, they want to capture images as they are, without compression.” They like their images “raw.” Thus, camera manufacturers strive for any com-pression scheme that can be efficiently imple-mented without losing any information. Tran’s memory buffering transform allows raw shoot-ing with faster frame speed—from the current three frames per second to possibly eight to 10.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” says Tran. “Not too many scientists have their algorithm adopted by the industry, let alone become a part of an international standard that can potentially alter the consumer electronics landscape.” —Joel Shurkin

The memory buffering transform technology developed by Trac Tran (center) and his team is key to the new JPEG XR, expected to take the consumer world by storm.

Explore the dynamic, online version of Johns Hopkins Engineering magazine athttp://eng.jhu.edu/wse/magazine-summer-09

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Designing minds

Going up?

On a gray, drizzly April evening, 10 engineering students pile into the Barton Hall Student Lounge to discuss the nitty-gritty of a project so ambi-tious it promises to burst through rain clouds and one day carry much-needed supplies to the International Space Station.

The students, enrolled in a new course—the ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) Team Project—are working on sketches for a real-life Space Elevator that will be entered into a compe-tition hosted by NASA next year. This course is a major part of the department’s new curriculum that allows freshmen to join projects and work with upperclassmen as they themselves advance.

The Hopkins team expects to compete against 10 other teams from universities, research consortiums, and aerospace companies worldwide. The prize if one of the teams actually manages to pull it off? Close to $1 million.

“NASA hoped to have this problem solved by now,” says Kieran Gupta, an electrical and

computer engineering major and a team leader. “So they accelerated the process.”

The idea for a Space Elevator dates to the 1960s when Russian scientist Yuri N. Artsutanov proposed the idea of a revolutionary Earth-to-Space transport system. The system would include a stationary cable rotating in unison with the Earth, anchored to the ground and held in space by a counterweight. An electric car—or Space Elevator—would travel up and down the cable, carrying people and cargo into space.

“This is a large and complicated system,” says Jin u. Kang, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Whiting School and faculty advisor to the students. “Right now, it is in its infancy.”

The team of Whiting School undergraduates is wasting no time getting started. They con-structed a mini-Space Elevator (2 feet by 2 feet) for testing at Homewood this past spring. The prototype mini-climber had to ascend 13 feet carrying 10 pounds—all powered by solar cells on its underside. “The idea [with the mini prototype]

is not to use electric or battery power,” explains Kang, “because eventually we will need a laser to power the elevator to climb into space.”

As demonstration day for the mini-elevator approached, students struggled with how much power they would need to turn the engine. “We worked for hours last night trying to figure out how many volts we need,” said Blaze Sanders ’12, a team leader.

“Are we doing something totally wrong?” he asked Kang, who checked the motor. Kang quickly calculated: about 7.2 volts. Sanders later marveled: “He figured it out in two seconds.”

The group also struggled with how to solder solar cells onto the bottom of the mecha-nism. The much-needed silver alloy can run as much as $25 for a single syringe. “Just get it,” advises Kang. “We are putting the solar panels on the underside and we don’t want them to come crashing down to the ground.”

To the student team’s delight, the mini-climb-er successfully met its first test, moving horizon-tally and vertically climbing a cable. “We are now working on integrating solar panels into our design, so that we can power it wirelessly with our high-powered halogen lights,” said Gupta afterward, adding, “A few of us on the Space Elevator Team (including myself) will be working on the project over the summer, and the entire team will resume intense work starting in September.”

Their next step: building the full-scale proto-type to be entered into the Power Beaming Climber Competition at Kennedy Space flight Center in florida in 2010. It will need to climb an impressive 1 km into space, carrying as much as 110 pounds.

The Whiting team members know they are up against many challenges. They use their weekly meetings with Kang to hash out details, seek guidance, and stay on track. By next year, they expect to have their full-scale model built and capable of traveling into space.

NASA has been hosting two related competi-tions since 2005, and to date no team has suffi-ciently met the engineering goals to win the prize or accomplish the ambitious goal.

But that doesn’t deter Kang. “We will see how we do,” he says. “We will try. And then we will try again. It may take three years. It may take 10 years. But we will keep trying ... until we win.”

— Mary Beth Regan

In its ambitious quest to develop an “elevator” to outer space, a Whiting School student team first constructed a “mini-climber” prototype—which successfully met its first climbing test this past spring.

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Modeling Better Glaucoma TreatmentGlaucoma affects some 2.5 million Americans —at least half of whom suffer from loss of vision—and is the second leading cause of blindness in the United States. The disease is the result of pressure built up in the eye that eventually presses on the optic nerve. The mechanics of that pressure is the subject of research currently under way by Thao “Vicky” Nguyen, assistant professor of mechanical engi-neering at the Whiting School.

Nguyen explains that the buildup of pres-sure within the eye may cause connective tis-sues—namely the cornea and sclera that form the outer shell of the eye and the optic nerve head that guides the optic nerves from the eye to the brain—to deform excessively and dam-age the optic nerves. To study the process, her lab uses bovine eyes fresh from the slaughter-house and donated human eyes. Cow eyes are particularly useful for developing an experi-mental method, she explains, because they are abundant and close enough in morphology to human eyes to allow her and her colleagues to draw inferences.

Nguyen is studying how pressure exerts stress on the walls, cornea, and sclera—particu-larly the sclera. “Because the macroscopic and microscopic structure of the sclera and the eye wall are non-uniform, the principles of mechanics tell us that the response of the sclera and eye wall to pressure is also non-uniform,” she notes. “For example, the ‘hoop stress’ is higher where the sclera transitions to the optic nerve head because the material of the optic nerve head is more compliant. Also, thinner regions of the sclera will deform more. These

analyses are confirmed by our experiments.” In experiments aimed at measuring dis-

placements, Nguyen speckles the eye with graphite powder and uses digital image correla-tion to track the motion of the speckles as the eye deforms. “To get mechanical properties, I have to fit a theoretical model for the stress-strain behavior of the sclera to this experimen-tal data using finite element analysis,” she says.

There is evidence that the stiffness and relaxation time of the sclera in healthy individ-uals is different from what it is in people with glaucoma; Nguyen is trying to determine whether these differences are caused by the ele-vation in pressure characteristic in glaucoma or whether they are preexisting conditions that can predispose someone to the disease.

Finding answers to that question will help guide development of non-invasive testing procedures that could identify individuals at higher risk for the initial development and rapid progression of the disease, notes Nguyen. “Moreover, the findings can guide the develop-ment of new drug therapies to mitigate the progression of the disease—therapies that would stiffen the sclera and reduce deforma-tion.” Her collaborator at Hopkins’ Wilmer Eye Institute, Harry Quigley, director of the Dana Center for Preventive Ophthalmology, is currently studying such drug treatments, which involve cross-linking collagen.

Nguyen is beginning to move her experi-ments to other animals, particularly mice, and to donated human eyes. “Comparing similar results of the human and mice studies may provide insight towards the development of gene therapy to reduce the risk of glaucoma,” she notes.

Nguyen says that her research has similar implications for myopia. “The prevalence of

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myopia is reaching near-epidemic level in several populations, particularly in Asians,” she points out. “By better understanding the corneo-scleral behavior, our work can lead to potential therapy to monitor and alter develop-ment of myopia-related disabilities, which currently represent a huge social cost in terms of refractive surgery and visual loss.” — JS

Mechanical engineering professor Vicky Nguyen, seen here with Baptiste Conavillier, says that her glaucoma research could also have implications for treating myopia.

A Tuition Break for Alumni and StudentsBeginning next fall, Hopkins undergraduates and alumni pursuing full-time master’s degrees in engineering at the Whiting School of Engi-neering will receive a 50 percent tuition grant.

Under the new Dean’s Fellowship program, the tuition break is available to any alum who earned his/her undergraduate degree on the Homewood campus and is accepted into a full-time engineering master’s degree program. Also eligible are full-time students enrolled in com-bined bachelor’s/master’s degree programs, which are typically completed in five years. The tuition break would apply to the fifth year of study.

“We have excellent engineering undergrad-uates at Johns Hopkins, and we’d like to encourage them to stay here and get their mas-ter’s as well,” says Dean Nick Jones. “We also want our students and alumni to be successful in their professional careers, and a master’s degree can give them an important competitive edge in a challenging job market. With the fellowship, we’re trying to make it easier for those who are already part of the Johns Hopkins family to obtain these degrees.”


An Organic Approach to SemiconductorsAlthough silicon-based semiconductors have transformed the world, creating the electronic age, they do have some shortcomings. For example, hard silicon components don’t bend or conform to tight or strange shapes, making them impossible for use in windshield-mounted dis-plays or wearable electronics, and they are diffi-cult to access for more complex jobs, like adjust-ing circuit frequencies, once they are made.

The solution, according to Howard Katz, chair and professor of materials science and engineering at the Whiting School, may be soft organic plastic electronics. Organic semicon-ductors are easy to manufacture, often cheaper

than silicon, and can both absorb and emit visi-ble light. Katz’s lab is developing transistors, diodes, sensors, and energy-converting devices such as solar cells, made from small molecule substances or long-chain polymers.

Organic semiconductors are based on research begun in the 1970s that went on to earn its inventors a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2000. It is not possible to go inside silicon and carve out the chemistry needed for tasks more complex than simple switching, Katz says, while

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organic semiconductors can be constructed mol-ecule by molecule, conforming to a task or form. Some organic and polymeric semicon-ductors can be bent or stretched over large areas, printed onto surfaces using ink-jet technology, or even spray-coated—deposited in ultra-thin films just a few molecules thick. They could also be used as electronic paper for a device like the Kindle, the electronic book reader, or to form arrays of microphones or solar cells.

Katz says organic semiconductors would be most effective in making sensors that can be deployed in places that rigid structures cannot reach. This would have broad ramifications for national security, for instance, for developing devices that can spot substances such as nerve gases and explosives. His lab is working on sen-sitive transistors that, exposed to targeted sub-stances, would show changed electric currents flowing through them even if the substances are at concentrations less than one part per million. The interaction between the transistor and the targeted substance happens right where the cur-rent is, he says, something that is very difficult to do with a silicon device.

While it is relatively easy to produce plastic semiconductors that transport positively charged holes, it is much more challenging to produce devices that transport electrons, which is one of the specialties of Katz’s lab. Some cir-cuits require both types, including solar cells, LED, and certain circuits, Katz says, which is why his lab is concentrating on the latter. The ability to work with both hole- and electron-carrying semiconductors opens up the possibili-ty to make printed circuits more energy effi-cient, and also to expand the scope of energy-conversion and storage devices, such as solar cells, thermoelectrics, and capacitors. —JS

Howard Katz and his team aim to produce plastic semiconductors that transport electrons—which could vastly expand the scope of energy-conversion and storage devices.

Katz says organic semiconductors would be most effective in making sensors that can be deployed in places rigid structures can’t reach—[offering] broad ramifications for national security.


alumni making news

A forward-Thinking CareerPercy A. Pierre, PhD ’67, played power forward for his high school basketball team. At 6 feet one inch tall, Pierre was somewhat undersized for the position and relied on his athleticism and determination to excel on the court. The team captain often did. Both his sophomore and senior years, Pierre led St. Augustine’s in New orleans to the city championship.

This combination of natural gifts, persis-tence, and leadership has served Pierre through-out his life—as White House fellow, an assistant secretary of the u.S. Army, engineering college dean, and university president. His decades of work in the field of electrical engineering and his efforts with minority advancement were honored last year, when he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. The NAE recognized Pierre for his service to the Army in research and development, his contributions to engineering education, and his leadership in creating a national minority engineering effort.

Pierre, the nation’s first African American to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering, says he has always felt an obligation to promote the engineering profession, in particular to minority students.

Born in Welcome, Louisiana, Pierre and his family later settled in New orleans. His father worked as a laborer on the riverfront and his mother was a homemaker. Though neither par-ent had any secondary education, he says, they made sure he and his two sisters set their sights on college.

Pierre embraced engineering his senior year of high school, particularly enjoying the physics of electricity. “It seemed like a challenging area, especially the theoretical side,” he says. After earning his BS and MS in electrical engineering at Notre Dame university, he strongly considered law school but decided to pursue a doctoral degree at the prompting of his faculty advisor.

Pierre applied to many schools, but chose Johns Hopkins. ferdinand Hamburger, then chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, took a strong interest in Pierre’s application and helped him to find a place to live in then-segre-gated Baltimore. At Johns Hopkins, Pierre focused on signal processing and began his work

on non-Gaussian random representations, specifi-cally in the statistical analysis of communications systems. The Navy funded most of his work, which would have applications in the understand-ing and use of underwater sonar. He published five papers on this topic and presented at a sci-entific conference at the university of Michigan. “Everything I did in the field originated from my work at Johns Hopkins,” Pierre says today.

After Hopkins, Pierre went on to hold a number of administrative posts in government and higher education. He first served as a White House fellow in the Executive office of the President from 1969 to 1970. Howard university then tapped Pierre to be its dean of the College of Engineering, a position he held until 1977.

During the ensuing four years, as Pierre

currently a vice president and professor emeritus at Michigan State university and a member of Notre Dame’s board of trustees.

Throughout his career, Pierre has pushed to increase minority involvement in engineering by establishing programs across the country, including Howard university’s first doctoral programs in elec-trical and mechanical engineering; the National Action Council on Minorities in Engineering; and the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science. Notably, he co-chaired the 1973 National Academy of Engineering Symposium, which launched the national minority engineering effort.

served as assistant secretary to the Army for research, development, and acquisition, he had direct responsibility for the development of all Army weapons, including the Abrams tank, the Patriot Air Defense Missile System, and the Apache attack helicopter.

“What was exciting for me was the opportu-nity to manage all these systems and programs to success,” he says. “We had the best technolo-gy in the world, but the work required many major technical adjustments. Sometimes we had to completely change course and find new ways of doing things. That period was perhaps the most exciting experience in my engineering career.”

In 1981, the u.S. Army awarded him the Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor presented to a civilian. Twelve years later the Navy bestowed on him a Superior Public Service Award.

Pierre also served as president of Prairie View A&M university (1983–89), vice president of research and graduate studies at Michigan State university (1990–95), and on the Michigan State faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (1995–2005). Pierre is

Pierre, the nation’s first African American to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering, says he has always felt an obligation to pro-mote the engineering profession, in particular to minority students.

In honor of these achievements, Pierre last year received the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Lifetime Mentoring Award.

Pierre says that it was during his time at Howard university that he was first approached by General Electric to help them in their minority engineering recruiting initiative. “I’ve had many opportunities since to kindle a love of science and engineering,” he says, “and I’m very proud to have been able to do that and help African Americans move forward.”

once a power forward, always one. —Greg Rienzi

throughout his career, Pierre has pushed to

increase minority involve-ment in engineering by establishing programs

across the country.


from the archives

for Those on the GI Bill, College Was Serious BusinessBefore Keefer Stull ’49 stepped foot in a Johns Hopkins engineering classroom, he had amassed a lifetime of stories. To name a few: Stull had walked the streets of a just-liberated Paris (Nazis and Parisians still openly traded gunfire) and trudged through frozen conditions near the Rhine River in the Battle of the Bulge.

Not your typical undergraduate, but the mid-to-late 1940s were different times. Stull and millions of other young men spent what would have been their college-age years serving in the military during World War II. Hundreds later came to Johns Hopkins courtesy of the GI Bill.

officially known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the GI Bill provided federal aid, including tuition assistance, to help veterans adjust to civilian life. The act would have a profound impact on college enrollment nation-wide, including at Johns Hopkins.

By April 1944, the School of Engineering’s enrollment had dwindled to 162 undergradu-ates. In his 1945 annual report, President Isaiah Bowman lamented the wartime disruption of higher education.

“Too few male students are available in the educational scheme to fill our graduate and professional schools next year and for years to come,” Bowman wrote. “The kind of higher edu-cation that gave us our technological superiority over the enemy was first curtailed drastically in the name of military necessity; now it has become a victim of military indecision and political delay.”

The end of the war and creation of the GI Bill changed all that. Throughout the summer of 1945, the Registrar’s office received on average 100 application inquiries per day. In response, the university created a Veterans office responsible for interviews and correspondence with entering undergraduates, allowing the Registrar’s office to focus on returning students.

At the start of the 1946–47 academic year, enrollment in the School of Engineering rose to 730, of whom 531 were veterans. The numbers of enrolled veterans would steadily rise over the next several years.

Stull joined Johns Hopkins in 1947, at the age of 23, after a stint in postwar Germany

Corporate Connections

Launching a Robust Partnership With RaytheonWhen Raytheon Company was looking to augment its systems engineering education for its top engineers, the company had its pick of universities nationwide.

In the end, the company selected the Whiting School of Engineering’s Engineering for Professionals (EP) program to offer the innova-tive Master of Science in Systems Engineering to an initial group of 130 employees at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, Arizona. JHu-EP’s ability to make the curriculum relevant to its industry partners, to offer courses taught by instructors with systems engineering experience, to incorporate learning objectives applicable to the workplace, and to have courses at Raytheon sites, were key factors in making the partnership possible.

“This is a very exciting partnership,” says Allan W. Bjerkaas, associate dean for the school’s EP programs. “We expect to see a strong benefit to both Raytheon and Johns Hopkins. Raytheon engineers will earn a degree in Systems Engineering and Hopkins instructors will cross-pollinate ideas with the Raytheon co-instructors.”

from Raytheon’s perspective, “This cur-riculum provides a critical element in our strategy to promote a systems engineering approach throughout our product life cycle,” notes Missile Systems Engineering Vice President Bob Lepore.

tion to aid in their work as the world’s leading designers, developers, and producers of complex systems.

The program follows on the heels of two other successful corporate partnerships. In the 1990s, Hopkins’ EP program launched its first partnership with BAE Systems, a global defense and aerospace company. EP also has teamed up with MITRE Corporation, a technology nonprofit organization.

under the latest program, 130 engineers at Raytheon Missile Systems have enrolled to receive their MS. An initial 24-student cohort started the first of 10 required courses in January. New cohorts start about every 10 weeks. As interest grows, other business units will add additional cohorts with the curriculum tailored to the local unit needs. Students will complete the curriculum in two years, compared to three years in a conventional on-campus set-ting. “The program is accelerated by about 30 percent,” says Bjerkaas.

Employees take nine consecutive nine-week courses and one 14-week capstone project course that requires they demonstrate their skill and knowledge of systems engineering. Weekly class sessions combine traditional and distance learning. Hopkins professors teach in Tucson on the first, fifth, and last class sessions of the courses. other class sessions are conducted over the Internet using Sakai, Polycom, and Adobe Connect. Each weekly class lasts four hours.

At least two Hopkins instructors, some of whom are from the Applied Physics Laboratory, teach each course. They are assisted by at least one company employee, hired as an additional

“We also appreciate that employees can take advantage of online learning and on-site classes, while completing work-relevant projects.”

The program is innovative because it allows Hopkins educators to design cutting-edge pro-grams targeted at specific needs. In this case, Raytheon will use systems engineering educa-

instructor. “This way the courses will be tailored to Raytheon’s business,” Bjerkaas says.

Bjerkaas expects such partnerships to be a model for the future—allowing the nation’s top corporate engineers to receive a valuable Hopkins education without missing a beat on their day jobs. — MBR

“This curriculum provides a critical element in our strategy to promote a systems engineering approach throughout the product life cycle.”—Bob Lepore, missile systems engineering vice president for Raytheon


where, among other things, he inventoried looted equipment. He had arrived in Europe in the fall of 1944. Blind in one eye, he served in the 102nd Infantry Division as a radio operator and repairman.

At Hopkins, he worked in ferdinand Hamburger’s lab, mostly doing repair work. Stull said he focused on studies and spent the major-ity of his free time with faculty and other vets. “I already knew more than [the faculty] could teach me, so I spent a lot of my time teaching undergraduates and the guys from [Baltimore Polytechnic Institute],” Stull says.

He graduated in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering but did not leave the university until 1955, remaining to take gradu-ate classes, conduct research, and teach radio classes. He later went to work for Westinghouse in its Aerospace division, where he helped develop pulse Doppler radar for fighter planes.

James Stimpert, university archivist, said that Stull’s undergraduate experience of all work no play was likely archetypal for a veteran.

“My sense is that a lot of the student tradi-tions, such as freshman hazing, went out when the veterans came to the campus,” Stimpert said. “I can imagine an ex-infantryman, entering Hopkins in his 20s, telling a nonveteran upper-classman: ‘You want me to do something stupid and ridiculous like that? Buddy, I spent months in foxholes with shells and machine gun fire all around.’”

Even those who didn’t see combat duty, Stimpert says, undoubtedly held special status on campus. Men like Joe Strohecker ’53.

By the time Strohecker made it to Europe, the war was over. He served in the Army Air Corps as a radio operator aboard a B-17 bomber that flew classified missions over Germany for one year.

The Baltimore native applied to Johns Hopkins in 1948 but was wait-listed. He studied elsewhere (Lehigh university for a brief stint, then Loyola College in Baltimore) before getting the green light of admission from Hopkins, where he studied industrial engineering. Like Stull, Strohecker’s approach to his education at Johns Hopkins was far from frivolous.

“We weren’t kids. A lot of us vets were very serious. We just wanted to get our degrees and get on with the rest of our lives,” says Strohecker, who went on to a long career at Western Electric. “for me, that meant no lacrosse games and not much in the way of social events. I spent most of my spare time working part time in a lab.”

The GI Bill paid Strohecker’s tuition in full, until it ran out his senior year. He went to Bill Kouwenhoven, then dean of the School of Engineering, to explain his situation. Kouwenhoven gave him a 50 percent scholar-ship, which meant Strohecker had to come up with the remaining $150.

“JHu did a lot for me. I sure count my bless-

a boost for Today’s gisWhiting school alumnus William F. Ward Jr.

’67 is so grateful for the hopkins education he

received under the gi bill that he has made

a $1 million gift to benefit today’s return-

ing servicemen and women. To be eligible for

the fellowship, a student must be a full-time

undergraduate or graduate student, honorably

discharged, with at least one full year of active

service.

“in 1970, when i completed my active duty

military obligation and returned to baltimore,

i was fortunate in that i was provided the

resources to complete my undergraduate edu-

cation at Johns hopkins,” says Ward, a univer-

sity trustee and Wse national advisory council

member. “in the current environment. the gi

bill, while very helpful, does not provide suf-

ficient funds to attend Johns hopkins. i would

hope that the gift i am making to the university

would allow returning service personnel the

ability to attend Johns hopkins and benefit as

i have from that opportunity.”

ings,” Strohecker says today. “I was able to attend a fine university, one that people respected. for me, it was the finest education I could get.” — GR

Co

uR

TES

Y: K

EffE

R S

TuLL

‘49

Keefer Stull ’49 (second from left) during his Hopkins days.


alumni making news

Engineering at full ThrottleAs a high school student, Stephen Lee ’99 dreamed of working on race cars. “I watched Team Penske win the Indianapolis 500 and thought, someday I’m going to work for Roger Penske,” he recalls.

However, Lee’s parents wanted him to become a doctor, so he enrolled at Hopkins’ School of Arts and Sciences as a biology major. It took only a year and a half for him to realize that biology wasn’t his strong suit and medicine wasn’t his calling. Lee transferred to the Whiting School to study engineering mechanics, focusing on aerodynamics. It was the first step toward making his teenage dream come true.

In the years since then, Lee’s career has been on the fast track. from working in R&D for NASCAR’s Team Penske to serving as a vehicle dynamics specialist for the late Dale Earnhardt, he has lent his engineering expertise to an impressive array of the profession’s greats.

After Hopkins, Lee headed to old Dominion university for its master’s program in aerospace engineering in a program funded by NASA’s Langley Research Center. “We put cars inside the wind tunnel and measured forces such as drag, lift, and pressure,” he says. one project involved using pressure-sensitive paint, which allows the engineers to visualize the pressure distribution on the car in a wind tunnel. “It’s very difficult to take accurate measurements from a car when it’s mov-ing, so instead we moved the wind,” says Lee.

one of the regular customers of old Dominion’s wind tunnel was Roger Penske’s NASCAR race team. After Lee finished his master’s degree, the team offered him a job to continue the R&D he had been working on at NASA. “It was pretty exciting. We were trying to figure out how to reduce drag and create more down force. The rules were quite strict so we could only make tiny changes to the shape of the car, like making the fenders slightly wider or narrower.” The goal, overall, was to “cheat the air,” he says. “We were doing the same things other engineers do, except we were doing them on race cars.”

After two years with Team Penske, Lee worked briefly for a motorcycle start-up company before taking a job with Pratt and Miller, where he spent six months working as a vehicle dynam-ics engineer assigned to Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s

Kudos

René Vidal, assistant professor in the Depart-ment of Biomedical Engineering, received a 2009 Office of Naval Research Young Investi-gator Award for “An Optimization Framework for Simultaneous Object Categorization and Segmentation.” The Young Investigator Program exists to recognize outstanding new faculty members at institutions of higher education, support their research, and encourage their teaching and research careers.

Three members of the Whiting School faculty received 2009 National Science

team. When the season ended, Lee moved on to the NASCAR circuit as an on-the-road race engineer with Robert Yates Racing. The NASCAR season, which runs february through November, “is very long and there is a race pretty much every week,” Lee says. “It was a lot of work and a lot of travel, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be the first Asian race engineer in NASCAR. one of my favorite memories was being on pole in my first race, the Daytona 500.”

His next stop: Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing (NHLR) as part of the McDonalds-sponsored team, driven by Justin Wilson, a veteran of formula one racing, and Graham Rahal, son of Bobby Rahal, the 1986 Indianapolis 500 champion.

Soon after Lee joined NHLR, the team was thrown into a whirlwind of activity when ChampCar, the series in which it had competed, merged with IndyCar, ending a 12-year split in open-wheel racing. “It was tough,” Lee says of the merger’s aftermath. “We had only six weeks to get ready for the first race with new cars on new race tracks.” Their concentrated efforts paid off, with the team winning both the second and penulti-mate race of the 2008 season.

The dust barely had time to settle on those victories before Lee left Newman/Haas/Lanigan—and car racing—to be a test director at the National full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. “I decided it was time to grow up, settle down, and get a real job,” he jokes. Lee still enjoys getting behind the wheel of his black 2005 Porsche Boxter S, though he swears he never speeds. “I’m a responsible guy!”

—Angela Roberts

Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards, which are given in recognition of young scientists’ commitment to research and education.

Noah Cowan, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the award for “Sensory Guidance of Locomotion: From Neurons to Newton’s Laws”; Jeff Gray, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received the CAREER award for “Structure Prediction of Proteins on Solid

Lee lent his expertise in 2008 to the McDonalds-sponsored team, driven by Justin Wilson and Graham Rahal.

Surfaces”; and Rachel Karchin, assistant profes-sor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, received the award for “Modeling Missense Mutation.”

The Homewood Academic Council recent-ly approved the promotion of four Whiting School faculty members. Allison Okamura in Mechanical Engineering has been promoted to professor. Promoted to associate professor are Hai-Quan Mao in Materials Science and Engineering, and David Gracias and Jeff Gray in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.


Crystal Ball

In the future, how will we be able to access the data we gather today?

Sayeed Choudhury ’88, ’90 (MS), associate dean for digital programs at the Sheridan Libraries, is also director of operations for the new Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES), a collaborative research center that includes scholars from Johns Hopkins’ libraries and the schools of Arts and Sciences and Engineering.

We’re clearly very good at gathering data. Take a picture with a cell phone and in addition to the pixels that make the image, tags are automatically attached to the photo relating to its context—the photo’s date, time, and even GPS coordinates. on a larger scale, scientists using remote sensors

that are placed across the country can gather huge amounts of detailed data without the con-straints of location and time. What we need to do is make sure the data we’re collecting can be

used—now and into the future. one of the problems IDIES is addressing

is that we don’t necessarily know how all of this data is going to be used in the future. Though it’s usually collected with a specific purpose in mind, it may be useful to someone else—now or a few years from now—for an entirely different reason. It could be that the metadata, the data about the data, is what makes it valuable. And as more of the research we’re doing is cross-disciplinary, the chances of there being new applications for the data increase.

So the problem becomes more complicat-ed. Not only do we need to capture and store a huge quantity of data, we need to do it in such a way that it’s reliably preserved and accessible to people in multiple disciplines for future use. Data preservation is really about risk management. We need to determine how our energy, time, and resources are best spent so that we can increase the probability that the data we’re collecting today can be used in the future.

Storage is not the solution. In 2008, the world ran out of storage for all the data that’s being collected. Already we have to ask our-selves: How much of the data needs to be stored? And we have to hope that we’re making

the right determinations.Worldwide, industry’s needs have dictated

our capacity for data storage. But industry only keeps data as long as it’s legally necessary. If there’s no longer a reason to keep it, it’s gone. Research doesn’t have these kinds of deadlines.

Standardization is an important part of this. Right now, only in certain disciplines is data gathered and metadata attached in a standardized way. With astronomy, a field in which researchers from many locations may use the same large instruments, there’s more standardization. But in chemistry, a field where people work in individual labs, there are far fewer standards. In five years, IDIES hopes to create standards across astronomy, biology, and Earth sciences. This will be critical to the future of mul-tidisciplinary research.

What surprises me more than anything is the lack of urgency around this issue. Hopkins is putting an infrastructure in place that we hope others can copy and is defining a new role for libraries in data management.

(Note: Johns Hopkins is currently one of two organizations with a pending award through the National Science Foundation’s DataNet program for $20 million over five years.)

Lean and GreenFor college students craving a caffeine or sugar boost, vending machines are a godsend. But dur-ing down times, after the building lights have been turned off and the doors locked, these machines are reduced to useless energy suckers—unless they’re equipped with “vending misers.”

These easily installed devices act as an “off” switch during low-usage periods. In academic buildings, that means electricity to vending machines is automatically extinguished during weekends and overnight.

To the student group Engineers for a Sustainable World, installing the devices throughout the Homewood campus was a no-brainer. Having done their research, the group knew that the up-front cost of $5,000 would soon pay for itself, and then some. Their pre-diction proved accurate: In less than two years, the energy savings resulting from the vending misers equaled their cost. Now, they’re saving the university between $2,000 and $3,000 a year in energy costs.

The vending misers came on the heels of another impressive campus sustainability project that, since its installation in 2005, has saved the Homewood campus hundreds of thousands of gallons of water annually. Initiated by the uni-versity’s grounds crew, this “smart” sprinkler system possesses multiple sensors that control metered water use depending on temperature, rainfall, and need.

Successful green projects like these, which conserve resources and funds, serve as a proto-type for a new and uniquely Hopkins way of funding sustainability projects. Last fall, the administrative members of the Sustainable Hopkins Infrastructure Program (SHIP) approved the following funding criterion for campuswide sustainability projects: The univer-sity’s financial investment in them must be returned within seven years.

“If a project is going to pay for itself over a period of seven years or less, we’ll figure out where we’re going to get that funding,” says James Aumiller, associate dean for finance and administration for the Whiting School of Engineering and a SHIP administrator. He

adds, “It is not our intent to restrict a project to a dollar amount, but these requests do need to be reviewed along with other budget requests.”

Driven by the administration’s nod of approval and a passion for making their sur-roundings greener and leaner, Hopkins’ engi-neering students are emerging as leaders in campuswide sustainability initiatives.

Environmentally conscious students needn’t wait for seniority before reducing Hopkins’ car-bon footprint. They can become ECO-Reps as freshmen. Each year, this freshman-only intern-ship program admits approximately 10 stu-dents, each of whom exhibits a strong desire to increase environmental awareness and sustain-able actions on campus.

“It’s really nice to be in a place with other people who really care about the environment,” says Rebecca Phillips ’12, an environmental engineering major. She and her fellow ECO-Reps completed a stint policing the trashcans of Homewood’s dining halls, making firm but polite requests for students to separate their trash into recyclable categories.

— Elizabeth Heubeck

In a quest similar to

that of the ’49ers of

times past, today’s

researchers are mining

immense mounds of

data to find that

elusive nugget of gold.

dS = µSdt + σSdz . . . dG =∂G∂S

µS +∂G∂t

+12∂ 2G∂S 2

σ2S 2 dt

. . . F = Ser (T − τ ) . . .

. . . dF = ( µ − r )Fdt . . . G = ln S . . . dG = µ −12σ2 dt + σdz . . .

P (t, T ) = E e−T

tr ( s )ds

C = E [e− rT (S (T ) − K )+ ]

1

Modern prospectors


µS +∂G∂t

+12∂ 2G∂S 2

σ2S 2 dt

. . . F = Ser (T − τ ) . . .


P (t, T ) = E e−T

tr ( s )ds

C = E [e− rT (S (T ) − K )+ ]

1

Modern prospectors

By Nick Zagorski

Photos by Will Kirk

in 1849, prospectors began flocking to the California hills in search of golden treasure, digging, panning, and blasting their n n 1849, prospectors began flocking to the California hills in search of golden treasure, digging, panning, and blasting their way through mounds of gravel and silt in search of a few of those

elusive shiny flakes that could turn their dreams of riches into a real-ity. And while often portrayed as dirty, bearded, and somewhat crazed, gold-rush prospectors were in fact frequently skilled engi-neers, using their knowledge of geology, hydraulics, and metallurgy to build sophisticated machinery to help them separate out the gold from the silt. Even though most came away empty-handed, it did not deter a host of others from pursuing their dreams against such enormous odds. The potential reward was just too great.


14 JOHNs HOpkiNs ENGiNEERiNG WiNTER 2009

Today, 160 years later, prospectors of a different sort are converging on a new source of untapped wealth: information. It’s everywhere; vast and interconnected information networks permeate every aspect of today’s society, wheth-er it’s the global network of financial markets, the global network of the World Wide Web, or even the global network of our body’s genes and proteins. And within these networks, well hidden and encoded, lies the gold: patterns. Locating and identifying these patterns could have repercussions ranging from the individual (doctors may be able to determine exactly how a cancer patient will respond to chemotherapy) to the international (security agents could quickly identify suspicious transactions that may have links to terrorism) level.

Of course, finding the needles in these information haystacks is a tremendously diffi-cult endeavor, especially considering that every

day our capacity for information expands. But, like the ’49ers of times past, today’s prospectors have developed their own sophisticated tech-niques to mine this immense data repository. Hailing from engineering, mathematics, and computing disciplines, these Whiting School data miners are initiating a new gold rush. Only this time, everyone can get rich.

The current economic situation may not be well suited for riches. But while most people

view the global downturn in the financial mar-kets and institutions with trepidation and anxi-ety, David Audley, PhD ’72, sees excitement and potential—from an academic perspective at least. “We’ve had a financial Big Bang,” Audley says. “The financial universe as we knew it has exploded, and now we have to figure out what shape the new universe will take.” As executive director of the Whiting School’s recently formed

Financial Mathematics Master of Science in Engineering, Audley is one of the people look-ing into this brave new financial world.

Just don’t ask him which stocks will make a big rebound, though. “Prediction is a fool’s game in finance,” he says. “The forces govern-ing the creation and movement of capital are just too complicated.” And Audley has a perfect perspective on this; after earning his PhD in electrical engineering here in 1972, he spent 16 years in the Air Force as a test pilot, then followed that up with 20 years as a Wall Street analyst and portfolio manager, before returning to his alma mater two years ago to take up his current post.

While both professions had their heart-wrenching moments, they differ in one critical regard, Audley says. “In the Air Force, I always knew that the principles of aerodynamics were governed by the laws of physics; tangible and ultimate truths. Then I came to Wall Street and discovered that in finance, there is no truth.” Audley is not implying that everyone on Wall Street is a crook, but instead that the intangibil-ity around global finance stems from the factors that control it—government regulatory laws, the ebb and flow of political power, and a host of other continually shifting elements.

Even though Audley deals with a non- tangible asset like global capital, he still very much feels like an engineer, or as he says, a prac-titioner (as opposed to economists who usually deal with the theory of finance). The interconnected world of finance is not much differ-ent from an electrical circuit; industries that produce capital act like nodes, with the goods and services produced by these industries travel-ing back and forth on the circuits between these nodes. And much like in electrical engineering, Audley makes use of principles like feedback and resistance to codify these financial networks.

The key elements to try and tease out from this continual back-and-forth, Audley says, are the cycles—whether they are day-to-day fluctu-ations in the stock market, or decade-spanning growths and recessions. Identifying the point at which a certain sector of the financial market may be in both its short- and long-term cycle, and where it might be 10 years in the future, can help to minimize the risks in planning a pension portfolio.

DaVID auDLeY maKes use of PrInCIPLes LIKe feeDBaCK anD resIstanCe to CoDIfY fInanCIaL netWorKs. the KeY eLements to tease out from thIs ContInuaL BaCK-anD-forth are the CYCLes—Whether DaY-to-DaY or DeCaDe-sPannIng.


To that end, Audley does make use of the instant data available from financial networks like Bloomberg, though even as he checks his computer to get the latest Treasury update, he stresses that he tries to limit his news intake; “These financial networks can be a little addictive,” he says. “It makes it hard to get my work done.”

Audley notes his current studies are very similar to his days on Wall Street as an invest-ment manager, primarily focusing on maximiz-ing the risk versus reward ratio, examining all possible scenarios to achieve some gain no matter how the economy turns out. “It’s analo-gous to driving down a long and bumpy road, knowing a stoplight is coming up in a few miles,” Audley says. “There’s no way to know when we get there whether that light will be red, yellow, or green, but our hope is no matter the color, when we reach the light we will know how to react, so we won’t have to slam on the brakes and spill our coffee.”

The aging Baby Boomers do more than present a financial dilemma for analysts like

Audley; they also present a growing health care concern. With a graying population come age-related diseases, most notably cancer but also neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s. Both disease types can be a huge burden to the patients, their families, and hospitals because they require years of continual treatment. To minimize the clinical burden and improve patient survival, it would be ideal to find people at risk for these diseases, diagnose them early, and determine which therapies might work best.

Mathematicians like Donald Geman know that many of the answers to these problems are encoded in the 3 billion bases that make up our


µS +∂G∂t

+12∂ 2G∂S 2

σ2S 2 dt

. . . F = Ser (T − τ ) . . .


P (t, T ) = E e−T

tr ( s )ds

C = E [e− rT (S (T ) − K )+ ]

1

DNA and the circumstances under which pieces of DNA, called genes, are activated. The only hitch is trying to extract that information. The technology to see what’s going on inside our cells is available, in the form of microarrays, or gene chips—small wafers typically not much bigger than a credit card that can contain any-where from a handful to a million tiny “dots”

of DNA, usually corresponding to a specific gene. When any sample, like say an extract of a tumor biopsy, is passed over these chips, the dots light up like a Christmas tree to reveal the relative abundance of those genes. However, it’s never so simple as to find a single target that can determine the presence of cancer; “As in many connected systems, genes operate under complex dependency,” says Geman, a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and member of Hopkins’ Institute for Computational Medicine. “You turn one gene off, it alters the levels of several other genes, which in turn branch out and affect some more.”

So the key is to identify patterns or trends, potentially involving several genes acting in concert, which differentiate healthy and diseased tissue, or suggest that patient A will respond to the latest cancer drug but patient B

Notes Audley, “We have always had modeling concepts to accommodate the extreme and rare behavior of markets and the consequential, but obscure correlations between finan-cial variables. The events we’ve seen over the past couple of years with the ‘credit crisis’ has provided a trove of data so that those concepts can be converted into models that can now be effectively parameterized; thereby providing useful guidance in the future to accommodate the balance of risk and return.”

Gene expression values (mRNA counts) are shown for 72 leukemia patients for two of the 7,129 genes on a particular microarray: SPTAN1 in red and CD33 in black. For the first 47 patients, who have acute myeloid leukemia (AML), SPTAN1 is usually expressed more highly than CD33, whereas for the second 25 patients, who have acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the reverse ordering is usually true. This allows AML and ALL to be well-separated based on a two-gene interaction.

16 JOHNs HOpkiNs ENGiNEERiNG WiNTER 2009

validation is necessary not just because of that small percent inaccuracy but also to weed out a second major hurdle in computational biology: overfitting. “It’s like the monkeys at a typewrit-er,” Geman says. “Researchers are willing to entertain so many possible rules for that limited amount of data that they’re bound to find some-thing by chance.” Unfortunately, this problem may not be overcome by advances in computing because it often arises from having too few samples to learn from. While researchers try and eliminate all bias in their search for genetic biomarkers, the highly competitive biomedical field—and its “We found it first!” mentality—makes it difficult.

“In your zeal to find something, you’ll find something,” he says.

Civil engineering professor James Guest is also a fan of the wonderfully complex

world of biology, though as a civil engineer, he gravitates toward the amazing structures found in nature. Take bone, for example. At the sur-face, bone appears ordinary enough: smooth, sturdy, and white; but farther down, at a micro-scopic level, bone is not simply a solid mass, but a dense and richly layered honeycomb that gives it a fair degree of flexibility (as those of us who have played with wishbones at Thanksgiving can attest to) and porosity. “The solid material and the gaps are interspersed in just the right places,” Guest says, “making bone perfectly designed for its biological purpose.”

Achieving that same high standard—opti-mal design—is what Guest hopes to do with other structures. Emerging in the 1990s as a progression from the field of structural design, structural topology optimization seeks the ideal design for structures—whether entire buildings and vehicles or the individual materials used in construction—for any given parameters. The field’s main applications lie in mass-produced items, where optimization can reduce the mate-rials, cost, and construction time needed. Though the field is still in its early stages (cur-rent applicability is limited to straightforward structures like trusses), Guest and other opti-mizers are hoping to improve their programs for more complicated systems, whether mun-dane (optimizing the strength and springiness

And given the level of complexity within genet-ic data, we would probably need trillions of samples to learn the interactions among many genes at once. So classical statistics is telling us: Don’t touch this, work on something easier.”

Geman and others aren’t fazed by such warnings. Their response to this number prob-lem is to have the programs identify a handful of linked genes that really stand out in their expression levels and then to make them repre-sentatives of the whole, just as election polls can provide reliable results using only a small subset of the general population. Much like those polls, these gene analyses are highly accu-rate, but not completely so; that +/- 3% hovers in the background.

At that point the biologists take over, to confirm whether the genes identified by the microarrays and programs are genuine and could be considered disease biomarkers. This

won’t. Geman notes that specialized computer programs called “machine learning algorithms” have been adapted from other fields like speech recognition (i.e., computers that can speak back what you type because they’ve learned the sounds made by specific letter combinations) to uncover these genetic patterns. The programs scan through samples where the outcome is known, like cancer or no cancer, trying to find a rule that can make subsequent predictions.

Herein lies a rub, however: sample size. While programs for speech analysis can pore over millions of sound bytes to train and iden-tify vocal patterns, computational biologists usually only have tens, occasionally hundreds, of tissue samples available. One may think this would be a good thing—that fewer data would make life easier for these algorithms. But, notes Geman, “when trying to extract information from data sets, more samples is always better.

for mathematICIan DonaLD geman, the KeY Is to IDen-tIfY Patterns or trenDs, PotentIaLLY InVoLVIng seVeraL thousanD genes, WhICh DIfferentIate heaLthY anD DIs-easeD tIssue, or suggest that PatIent a WILL resPonD to the Latest CanCer Drug But PatIent B Won’t.

of micro-grippers) or exotic (optimizing the weight and thermal conductivity of spacecraft heat shields).

Guest’s particular interests lie in optimizing micro-scale structures, like the stacked layers of bone tissue. He believes improving micro-designs will be necessary to develop effective biomedical structures, like tissue scaffolds or integrated drug delivery devices—an area that both he and Hopkins are keenly interested in.

For a simpler example, Guest notes a prod-uct commonly used in many areas like medi-cine, industry, and even domestics: filters. To the eye, most filters appear like plain paper or other simple material, but under a microscope, they’re a complex meshwork of fibers that enables liquid to separate from particulates. Topology optimization—which happened to be Guest’s dissertation work—would attempt to identify the mesh pattern that can maximize

liquid flow while retaining enough strength to withstand the pressure of the flow. Even a sim-ple filter, like a coffee filter for example, can arrange itself in nearly limitless conformations that provide various levels of strength and per-meability. How to find the one golden arrange-ment? Unfortunately, unlike evolution, Guest does not have hundreds of millions of years to work with. So powerful computing technology will have to suffice.

“Conceptually, it’s not too difficult,” Guest says, bringing over his laptop computer and indicating a green oval on the screen. “Imagine this as our starting structure; now, I’m going to apply two forces, pulling on the left and right side, like you were trying to rip it in half.” Guest then presses a key, and instantly patches of yellow, red, and blue appear at the oval edges, gradually moving inward toward the center. Essentially, the optimization program

These images provided by Guest depict the design of engineered materials with optimized properties. The algorithm begins with a non-discrete topology (top) and converges to a clear microstructure that yields an optimal combination of stiffness and fluid flow properties (middle). This pattern is repeated to form the bulk material (bottom).

JamIe guest’s Interests LIe In oPtImIz-Ing mICro-sCaLe struCtures—neCessarY for DeVeLoPIng BIomeDICaL struCtures, LIKe tIssue sCaffoLDs or IntegrateD Drug DeLIVerY DeVICes.


proceeds from point to point, analyzing what should occupy that spot for the best force response—red equals material, blue equals empty, and green equals don’t know. Eventually, the forces reach the center, completing an ele-gant snowflake-like structure. Depending on how much force is applied and at which loca-tions, the optimal design can change, and in a few moments, Guest has produced a virtual kaleidoscope of different designs.

As Guest proceeds to unveil a few more of his models, for example a cube filled with protrusions and crevices to the point it resembles a well-played Jenga tower, one might wonder whether Guest is really a civil engineer or in fact an aspiring artist. “What I most enjoy about structural optimization is that every design starts as a blank canvas; once I set up the optimization program I

can sit back and watch the structure unfold,” he says.

Of course, in the real world, finding the ideal micro-scale design for systems like synthetic bone or ligaments, which are influenced by several competing properties, is near impossible; so like Geman, Guest makes some concessions. Potential structur-al designs map out much like an egg carton, filled with peaks (undesirable) and valleys (desirable), while theoretically there is one valley deeper than all the rest (a global minimum). Guest notes the best hope is uncovering a near-optimal local minimum. “After I find an initial design, I tweak some parameters and run the program again, and see if it improves at all; I keep doing that until I can’t say, ‘I’ve done better than before’ anymore.” Guest also notes that

structural design considers non-quantifiable constraints as well, like cost or aesthetics, so the most optimal design may not be the best-suited anyway.

When Guest has refined his optimization programs a little more, computer sci-

ence professor Andreas Terzis might be one of the many clients eager to step up. For the past several years Terzis, along with Alex Szalay in Physics and Astronomy at the School of Arts and Sciences (who helped develop the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an enormous astronomical database), has been working on a set of devices that could certainly benefit from some optimi-zation: wireless sensor networks.

Portable battery-powered devices not much bigger than a cell phone (and getting smaller every year), motes are tiny computers that can be fitted with a variety of sensory devices, such as thermometers, pH meters, or humidity sen-sors, to transmit real-time sensory information from multiple locations simultaneously. Sensor nets, which are collections of mote devices, were originally developed around a decade ago for military applications (as many advances seem to be) but have now reached a point where scientists can begin to use them for large-scale applications.

One area where sensor nets can make a sig-nificant impact is in environmental monitoring, as their small, wireless design enables them to collect synchronous data in places people can-not easily do so (forests, mountains, etc.). “Each piece of data by itself is not spectacular,” Terzis says, “but now we can put all the pieces togeth-er from different parts of a forest and begin to see trends emerge that we didn’t know about.” Terzis and Szalay, for example, have teamed up with Katalin Szlavecz in Earth and Planetary Sciences at the School of Arts and Sciences to examine the contribution of soil to carbon diox-ide flux. “On land, soil acts as both a major pool and source of carbon dioxide,” Terzis says. “But there is growing concern that with global warming, the processes that generate carbon dioxide in soil are accelerating; so we’re going to place these sensor nets in the ground and study long-term carbon dioxide flux.”

Sensor nets can be just as valuable in urban

“eaCh PIeCe of Data BY ItseLf Is not sPeCtaCuLar,” saYs anDreW terzIs, “But noW, [WIth sensor net teChnoLogY], We Can Put aLL the PIeCes together from DIfferent Parts of a forest anD BegIn to see trenDs emerge.”


settings; they can greatly improve patient moni-toring in hospitals, allowing staff to keep track of patients at all times, and city planners can use them to monitor traffic patterns through-out the day to identify congestion hot-spots. And in a perhaps fitting twist, these sensor nets are even finding a home in the information technology arena world.

“As a whole, data centers consume enough power for 5.8 million average households (as of

2006), and this figure is expected to double in five years,” Terzis says. Only half of this energy usage comes from the actual computers storing all our valuable data, however; the rest comes from the air conditioning required to prevent the servers in the large data centers at compa-nies like Microsoft and Google from overheat-ing. “These companies don’t often know exactly how much cooling they need,” Terzis says, “so they’re often being liberal and overcooling,

which wastes energy.” By placing sensor nets throughout these data centers, the IT people can set up real-time 3-D heat maps, allowing them to optimize server cooling and identify possible heating concerns immediately.

The potential uses for sensor nets, in fact, are so numerous that they do raise a significant obstacle, one that researchers in many of these data mining fields have had to tackle. “This technology is being used in previously untapped areas, meaning there are no standard programs or formulas that we can use,” Szalay says. “So the emerging challenge for us is inventing the next generation of algorithms for this wide array of new applications.”

Such challenges do not faze a prospector like Terzis; he relishes them. As a graduate stu-dent at UCLA, Terzis had worked on develop-ing Internet technology, but as this tool was shifting from a research program to a commer-cial product, he found his options becoming limited. “And that’s what drew me into this field, because wireless sensor networks are ready to explode, I think,” he says. He adds a thought likely on the minds of all the data miners: “As a scientist, you like to go in an area where things are happening fast.” n

Using sensor nets, Terzis’ team was able to gather data showing daily variations in soil temperature between forest and grass loca-tions in a Baltimore County neighborhood. The goal: to understand the aptiotemporal variations in long-term soil carbon dioxide fluxes.


If visitors to Homewood campus wander long enough, eventually they stray from leafy tree-lined paths to the glassy breezeway leading to the Computational Science and Engineering Building (CSEB). Here, large picture windows offer a glimpse into the future of medicine—a mock operating room where Hopkins engineers, surgeons, and computer scientists push the limits of surgical robotics to test

advances that will lead to the safest, most-effective surgical treatments for patients. “In order to develop technology, you need to work on the systems in an operat-

ing room without a hospital’s logistical constraints of time and space,” says Russell Taylor ’70, professor of computer science and director of the WSE’s Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology. “The Swirnow Mock OR is making everything we do with the Hopkins School of Medicine more effective, and it’s bringing the two campuses together. It’s an excellent staging ground for a real-life environ-ment and an exceptional teaching lab for undergraduates and graduates working together.”

The Mock OR, which opened in 2007, was made possible through the gener-osity of Richard A. Swirnow, who earned his BS in industrial engineering from Johns Hopkins in 1955. Swirnow’s gift also led to a unique partnership between the Whiting School and Intuitive Surgical Inc., with the recent installation of Intuitive’s da Vinci Surgical System.

A Glimpse Into the Future of Medicine

By Mary Beth Regan

Photos by Will Kirk


A Glimpse Into the Future of Medicine

The Mock OR’s newest marvel, the daVinci Surgical System, looks like a high-tech octopus. However, it is actually a very sophisticated surgical tool that permits surgeons to perform highly dexterous surgical tasks. The surgeon controls the motion of surgical instruments inside the patient’s body by moving control handles at a console next to the operating table, while observing a 3D video image of the surgical site.

The $1.5 million da Vinci, manufactured by Intuitive Surgical Inc. of Sunnyvale, California, arrived on campus in late March on loan for three years. Although the system will be used only on nonliving models, it is identical to systems that are routinely used clinically.

“The da Vinci is the most successful surgical robot in widespread clinical use today,” says Taylor. “Its arrival is the result of long-standing research collaboration with Intuitive, and it will significantly enhance our ability to develop new ways to use computer-based technology to help surgeons in minimally invasive procedures.”

Taylor expects many advances: “Having this amazing machine in the Mock OR puts it in an environment where it is easy for students and faculty alike to try out new ideas. It is a big step along the path from bench to bedside, and we are extremely grateful for this generous loan.” n

Graduate students Seth Billings (above, right) and classmate Carol Reiley look on while Marcin Balicki (left), seated at the master con-troller, uses his thumb and forefinger to open and close a surgical instrument. Although grasping the master controller, Balicki feels as if he is hold-ing the instrument in his hand.

Left: The master controller provides the surgeon with six degrees of freedom.

Working at the master console, Marcin Balicki (seated) views a stereo display of the surgical

tools he is manipulating at the operating table.

Standing are Carol Reiley, Professor Russ Taylor, and

Seth Billings.


In their quest for admittance to the Whiting School this fall, all 4,490 high school applicants were asked to complete a personal essay. The goal, in the words of

the Hopkins Admissions team? “To help us to become acquainted with you as a person and student, apart from courses,

grades, test scores, and other objective data.” Below we bring you a sampling of five such essays—heartfelt, revealing, and sometimes quirky—from students who have been accepted and will join the freshman class here in September.

Getting to Know You


The World I Come from

By Tiras Lin

Eight hours of English and eight hours of Mandarin—this is how a typical day of mine adds up. Throw in a few more hours of Taiwanese, and maybe one or two of Spanish and my day starts over again.

For my parents, plans for my future were simple: I was to turn in my homework, get good grades, and go to a well-known college. Both of them work in the field of software engineering and also manage their own company. No pressure.

They live in a delicate matrix that translates into a safe, defined path when it comes to taking care of me. E-mail client. Debug pro-gram. Ship USB key overseas. Raise kid. Being a good mathematician and scientist was a no-brainer—we left creativity for the Others to pon-der. And something about being Asian, something about my culture, kept me and my parents focused. Integrals, vectors, hydroxyl groups—these things guaranteed a secure future.

But the rules of that world were too strict for me. Every year when I show my parents my course selections for the coming year, I am also leading them on a hike into alien territory. Multivariable Calculus and Chamber Ensemble? Advanced Physics and Advanced Photography? Arts smacked of a dismal financial future! I can follow rules in my math classes, but what am I supposed to do in my arts classes? An Arts formula simply didn’t exist.

From my early high school years, I had a strong interest in becom-ing an architect. The study includes all my loves—graphics design, working in 3D, math—it seemed like the perfect match. But my internship in Taitung, Taiwan, at a popular architecture firm last

summer brought the stark realities of the study of

architecture to my attention.What if no one liked my designs? What if I ran out of assignments?

I saw firsthand, for nearly a month and a half organizing blueprints in air-conditioned offices and talking to sweaty workers at construction sites, why my parents were concerned. Architecture became less of a dream career and I’ve gradually placed my creative outlets elsewhere.

I was moving past the security that my parents had prescribed, and becoming more and more motivated by my experiences on stage and behind my camera viewfinder. But I’m not a rebel to my parents in any way though—that was a fragile line I decided that I couldn’t afford to cross. Instead, I’ve built up my creative side to include traces of struc-ture. What others consider a creative writing assignment I consider a chance to show off my neurotic precision. When others see an open-ended photo project, I see a chance to calculate exposure and map out the world around me. The classical “Asian-insurance” that my family worked so hard to create was not destroyed, but rather tweaked to fit my state-of-the-art perspective of the Rules.

The variables keep changing, but somehow I’ve been able to fit myself into the system; my mind has become subtly “un-Taiwanese.” And now it is my burden to move into the future without forgetting my past, to thrive in my own microcosm without abandoning my parents’.

Tiras Lin grew up in San Rafael, California, where he attended the Marin Academy High School.

The Problem-Solver

By Christian Wisner-Carlson

When I perceive a problem, I feel compelled to solve it. For example, I used to sleep through my alarm clock, not even hearing it at full volume. Fed up with being late to school, I engineered my own alarm, which would turn on loud music and a bright light to wake me. The solution consisted of electrical circuits and computer code to con-trol the system.

First, I had to design the electrical aspect of my alarm: I used two solid state relay switches (SSRs), a transistor, some resistors, a parallel cable, a 24V power supply, and some other parts— mostly salvaged from old and broken equipment—to create an apparatus that allows me to con-trol the power to an old guitar amplifier and to my sunlamp through my server’s parallel port. Next, I attempted to acquire datasheets for the SSRs (SSR-A and SSR-B) and other parts, finding comprehensive specifications only for SSR-A and the transistor. From the specs, I deduced that SSR-A needed approximately 4.0mA of 3 to 24 volt DC current to activate.

To prevent damage to my server, I researched the maximum load allowed on an IEEE-1284 compliant parallel port. Since IEEE-1284 requires the port to be able to source at least 14mA of current at approxi-mately 5 volts, I felt confident that SSR-A could safely be connected to it. I connected SSR-A to data pin 7 and a ground pin on the parallel cable. I connected the amplifier to wall current in series with SSR-A and to a spare audio out channel on the server. Connecting SSR-B was a lot more difficult, since I didn’t have the specs for it and did not want to overload my parallel port. I created a circuit with the transistor, the resis-tors, SSR-B, and the power supply. The transistor is controlled (through a current limiting resistor) by current between pin 8 and ground of the parallel cable, and supplies SSR-B with sufficient power from the power supply when it is activated by at least 3.5 mA of 3V current. I wired the sunlamp to wall power in series with SSR-B.

Like any computerized gadget, my alarm needed instructions to fol-low, so I wrote a C program and a Bash script. The C program interfaces directly with the parallel port and turns on and off data pins based on its input. I wrote a Bash script that switches the relays on by calling my C program with the appropriate arguments, starts playing a random song

through the audio channel connected to the amp, and increases the volume by 10 percent every five minutes. I attached a remote control receiver to the server, changing a few lines of code of a driver for a similar device (also written in C) in order to make it function on Linux. I

programmed the remote so that one button tells the alarm script to “snooze” and another turns it off.

Of course, my prototype hit some snags such as a low-pitched buzz from the amp that persisted while the relay was off. Since solid state relays leak a small amount of current in their off state, I theorized that the ballast in the sunlamp was oscillating, inducing interference in the power supply to the amp. I tested that theory by isolating the amplifier, which eliminated only some of the noise. Next, I connected a 50-watt incandescent light bulb in parallel with the amplifier, so that the leaked current would be dissipated by the bulb, solving the problem. Now, I actually get to school on time.

For a career, I hope to use my knack for engineering creative solu-tions to solve real-world problems. For instance, I envision designing a standard interface for consumer electronics that would allow them to be completely controlled by computer. This would save manufacturers money because they wouldn’t have to implement costly human interface systems. Consumers would be rescued from tedious buttons, never again forced to program their VCRs and telephones by hand. Instead, they would be able to use dedicated devices such as touchscreen monitors and remote controls to manage everything from central locations. Devices would also be able to share information with each other (subject to the owner’s approval, of course). By sharing my ideas with like-minded peo-ple and collaborating to design creative technological solutions, I expect to make the world a better place.

Christian Wisner-Carlson, who graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, is a Baltimore Scholar and member of the Dean’s Innovation Group—students selected for their academic success and independent research.



Yellow Jersey

By Roger Henry

During my early days of recreational soccer, my favorite game was keep-away. The game was more of a drill, Coach’s futile effort to build in us a sense of unity and camaraderie: “You bunch up too much,” he used to say. “You need to learn to think like a team.” The rules are simple: There are two teams, one red and one blue. To score a point, a team has to maintain possession of the ball for at least 10 passes. Additionally, a neutral player wearing a yellow jersey can help whichever team currently has the ball. Being neutral was best because rarely did I have the freedom to be on both sides of a game, to not have to choose who to make my enemy and my friend. I loved it because, at the end of the day, I could revel in the glory of winning and still lament with the losers. After that I always knew the yellow jersey had to be mine.

Many areas of my life have this same characteristic impartiality. I’ve grown up on the very border between the City of Trenton and the Hamilton suburb. Looking east, down Hamilton Avenue, I can see the city where I was born. Sadly, like many cities Trenton is an empty shell of its old self, a reminder of a previous time of business and prosperity. People I know talk of Trenton as if it is some disease, as if by associating with the city they’ll likely be infected with it, engulfed by it: “When are you going to move out of there?” my aunt asks. “The neighborhood is getting worse and worse.” When you look west of my street, straight into Hamilton Township, the opposite effect occurs. As if through a curtain you move from the squalor of the city to the comfort of the suburbs, from row houses to colonials with backyards and clean sidewalks. Since Trenton is so close, I’m forced to act in any way I can; volunteering at Trenton Junior Golf Program and serving at Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen have become more of a neighborly obligation than social charity. Going to school in another state every day has only magnified this economic dichotomy. With my parents’ generosity I’ve had the chance to attend a prep school in Pennsylvania despite our already tight budget. Statewide differences are more apparent to me than anyone else at my school, like the way my peers say “copybook” instead of “notebook,” and how New Jersey drivers are clearly safer than Pennsylvanian drivers. Being “in the middle” of everything thus gives me a unique kind of social awareness that parallels that of the neutral player in keep-away. Knowledge of the big pic-ture gives me more responsibility, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

That yellow jersey also has a physical hold on me, as it is held perma-nently and inextricably in my flesh. Ethnicity has been one of the biggest

issues in my life because, being both Irish and Chinese, not even my race is a uniform color. I used to be thoroughly ashamed of being biracial—why wasn’t I just born one or the other? Once, during a shadow day at my current high school some-one asked me point-blank, “would you rather be white or Asian?” If I were Caucasian I would fit in more with my family, since most of my mom’s side is still overseas. My dad’s side is 100% Irish, bordering on

nationalistic. Being all-Irish would mean going to the annual Hibernians dinner without feeling like an outsider, maybe even joining my cousin Sean in Lia Fail, his bagpipe troupe. It would also mean meeting the sta-tus quo, blending in physically with my peers and some 65 percent of the nation. Being completely Asian, on the other hand, would afford me some other opportunities that I’ve longed to possess. Having no relatives from China or Indonesia in the United States, that culture is all but lost. As much as I feel alienated from the white and Asian cultures, however, I recognize the special chance I have to bridge the gap between them. At C.A.F.E. (Cultural Awareness for Everyone), my school’s ethnic discussion group, we often talk about the cultural differences between Asian-American and European-American teen lifestyles. Having a mother who came from a family of 13 children, I can understand why population density is a large reason that Asian children are often instilled with a com-petitive spirit. Ethnic diversity has thus given me another rare chance to empathize with contrasting groups of people.

My entire life has been a series of these “keep-away” games, with teams that are divided economically, socially, or ethnically. In each game I have, for better or worse, been that one neutral player, stuck between two spheres. What I’ve learned, however, relates to something F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchant-ed and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” Given the chance, I would never pick a side for the same reason I wouldn’t when playing soc-cer. Diversity made me who I am, forced me to be conscious of both sides of any issue. College eliminates those distinctions and gives everyone a neutral yellow jersey. Luckily, I know this position well.

Roger Henry, who attended the all-boys Holy Prep High School in Pennsylvania, earned an 800 on the writing portion of the SAT.


Minority Report

By Hannah Bands

Although I have gained important academic knowledge during my high school career, my experiences with a diverse group of friends have had an equal impact on the way I think and prepared me to live in a diverse world. My middle school had some diversity but most of the students were, like me, white middle class preteens whose families had been in the U.S. for generations. I was used to going to school with girls who looked like me, ate the same food as me, and had the same amount of money as I did. While most of my peers chose Catholic high schools, I decided to go to an urban public magnet school. I grew up in an ethnical-ly mixed neighborhood, and I was eager to go to school with a different group of peers. I was aware that the demographic at my high school would be very different (majority African American and largely low-income) and I knew that I would need to get used to a very different group of peers and environment quickly.

What I did not anticipate was the ease with which I would transition into this new world. There were, of course, many surprises. For example, frugality was not something to be scorned as stinginess, but a virtue to be praised. Although it seemed that we were not always speaking the same language, conversations we had about racial and class tensions were not at all tense. I found discussions of affirmative action, for example, to be fascinating, as my classmates represented a group that I had never heard speaking on this topic. Although I had anticipated being an ethnic minority, I did not realize that I would also be a gender minority. Most of my teachers and fellow students in my accelerated math and science courses were male. This trend has become more pronounced as the years have gone on, so that I am now the only female left in my math class. Again I found that keep-ing an open mind leads to an exposure to new points of view.

When I started working at a psychology lab, I again found myself different from everyone else. I was almost entirely surrounded by Asian American undergraduate and graduate students. I learned about Asian American culture in two ways simultaneously; from a theoretical per-spective through the papers I read, and a practical perspective from my

fellow researchers, many of whom were born in China or Korea. Some of the most enlightening experiences for me are the conversations that I have had with other research assistants about what they knew about the United

States before coming here, and how they felt after arriving. Many had a narrow view of the United States, and had formed conclusions about this coun-try through, for example, the television show Gossip Girl, about upper-class teens in Manhattan. This suggested to me that I am perhaps just as ignorant about other cultures as they were about mine, and that a culture cannot be understood through only a few sources. It showed me that I should be careful in drawing conclusions about another group of people.

I also encountered a new group of people out-side of an academic setting around this same time. Although when I joined my fencing club there were many young people, soon my sister and I were the only long-term members under 40 years old. This could have meant that I would have no friends at

fencing, but instead I befriended the other fencers who serve double-duty as mentors and pals to me. They share their wisdom about everything from literature to lessons from their own lives.

My time spent as a minority in almost every sense has changed the way I look at the world, especially with regard to inter-group communi-cation. My most immediate gain is exposure to many different cultural perspectives, as well as an appreciation for individual differences within each group. I also now feel much more comfortable talking to people whose lives are quite different from my own, because I know that discus-sions of even the most controversial topics are likely to be rewarding in the end. I feel confident that I can find friends and be comfortable sur-rounded by almost any group of people.

A graduate of Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Baltimore Scholar Hannah Bands decided she wanted to attend Johns Hopkins when she was in the first grade. She is a member of the Dean’s Innovation Group—students selected for their academic success and independent research.

Turning Point

By Tobechukwu Madu

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

— African Proverb I wasn’t a lion or a gazelle. Yet, from the fall of 2001

through to the summer of 2005, I was running in a race, an exhilarating one. Those four years in Lumen stand out as the most outstanding period of my life. I call it the turning point of my life. The setting was a hybrid cross between a military academy and a monastery disguised to look like a learning institution. It was officially called Lumen Christi International High School (L.C.I.H.S) even though the closest it got to being “interna-tional” was a faculty member from neighboring Cameroon. This was where I got the first four years of my secondary school; in a village in Nigeria. It was my first place of exposure to the “real” world; an all-boys, ultra-conservative, Catholic boarding school that did not mirror anything about the world I’d be facing later on but taught me all I needed to know.

Life was a routine for 980 days. Like an Olympic 10,000km race, one turned around the same bends every time, each and every single time. Every day, the race began at the stroke of dawn…

…5:00…the school bell jingles and it’s time to get up from the sweet soothing dream of home and face one more day of the torture euphemis-tically referred to as “school.” I reluctantly get up from my bed only to find out that my bucket of water which was supposed to be under my bunk is missing. Since the school is located in a water-deficient society, water was gold and as a result student-thieves resort to stealing other peo-ple’s water in the middle of the night. First lesson of the day; like in the real world some people work hard for the wrong reasons and sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. Luckily, 30 minutes later I fetch another bucket of water, wash myself and get ready for the day. Today is a really good day, sometimes I am not able to get water and then I dress up in my filth bathed in an overdose of deodorant and walk slowly to the chapel. 6:00…the morning prayers are said followed by a mass during which morals (food for the spirit) that would last for a lifetime are instilled into my little mind. By 7:00, the mass is ended and we have to go in peace to do our morning chores which takes roughly 15 minutes. I had to sweep a long line of corridors, but that was better than having to

wash the communal pit toilets. After that, there is the communal breakfast (never enough). 7:45 sees us at the daily assembly after which classes from 8:00 a.m. till 2:00 p.m. dominate our life (12.00…we say the angelus). In this school, an average student takes 15 subjects. Education is a clear priority. After school, there is lunch and an hour- long siesta. By 4:00, we walk back to class clumsily for a 90-minute prep (study) session. Then there is the one hour of game time that I spend playing

soccer and goofing around with friends. 6:30…evening prayers, 7:15…dinner, 8:00… prep (again?), 10:00…night prayers and then the long awaited …bedtime…10:30…

…It wasn’t a race of physical power nor dexterity but rather one of endurance; enduring nostalgia at the age of nine. A race that forced you to keep holding on, practicing, fighting, studying with hope that all this hard work will come to fruition. This race, I kept on running all those years till I found myself in the Netherlands. Then I ran. And I practiced. And I ran again. Wait, you had to practice before running? You ran for a medal? You ran for something? You ran for a prize? I was stunned!

1095 days later, I still think about the three most important events of the day; prayer for the spirit, food and exercise for the flesh, and academic knowledge for the mind. These principles imbibed from the years spent at Lumen Christi International High School, Uromi, Edo State, have made me the individual that I am. After juggling hours of religious studies mixed with the more conventional secondary school curriculum in such a sub-standard environment as in Lumen, a day in the American School of the Hague (A.S.H.), even with the rigorous curriculum, is paradise. After 14 years in Nigeria, the race to be run at A.S.H.—an international, American, co-ed, ultrasecular private school—remains a worthwhile enjoyable challenge. It gives me the experience of a universal educational training from two worlds, two continents, two countries. It is not over though; the last 100m of the 400m final is yet to be run in the Netherlands before I move yet again. Move to another world, another continent, another country. Like every competent athlete, eager for the next challenge, the next race, adventure, competition. No fear. Bring it on.

Tobechukwu Madu was born in Nigeria and spent the first 14 years of his life in the Niger Delta region. Four years ago he moved to the Netherlands, where he recently completed high school at the American School of the Hague.


alumni and leadership making an impacT

An Investment in the FutureSince graduating from the Whiting School in 1980 with a degree in mathematical sciences, Marshal Salant has offered not only his resourc-es but his time and considerable expertise across the Homewood campus: He has helped to develop the Whiting School’s graduate Financial Mathematics Program, played a lead-ership role in the establishment of the Center for Financial Economics, supported Johns Hopkins Hillel, and made a world-class educa-tion possible for students like Courtney Souza, the 2008 inaugural recipient of the Marshal and Janet Salant Homewood Scholarship.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the work-ings of the human body and intrigued by the challenges that a career in the medical field can bring,” says Souza. The Salant Homewood Scholarship has enabled her to attend Johns Hopkins, putting her in the ideal place to achieve her goals. “Without this scholarship, I would not have been able to afford to come here,” she says.

Salant, a university trustee and Whiting School National Advisory Council member,

also established the Marshal L. Salant Student Investment Team in 2000, which brings together about 10 students and a faculty advisor to manage a full investment portfolio. The group researches

stocks and meets weekly to decide how to invest real money, with their profits funding a scholarship for undergraduates.

“I try to support as many Homewood areas as I can because I was very involved in Engineering and Arts and Sciences programs when I was a student,” says Salant, Citigroup managing director, “I could not afford to enroll as a freshman, so I had to apply for significant financial aid to attend Johns Hopkins; The university responded with scholarships, loans, and a work study job that allowed me to come to JHU.”

For Isaac Tay ’07, the team did more than introduce a new hobby—it ignited his enthusi-

asm for the world of finance, and introduced him to a mentor who would be invaluable in matching his passion with opportunity.

Tay was a freshman biology major who spent most of his days in the lab when he joined the Salant Investment Team. “I thought I would try something different, never thinking I would want a career in the industry,” he says. “But then I found that it was really interest-ing—and I was having fun.” He was thrilled when Salant stopped by one of their meetings to offer his guidance and advice in person. As a junior, Tay met Salant once again while on

the annual “Day on the Street” Intersession trip to Wall Street. The trip, the capstone experience of an intensive three-week seminar in financial literacy, gives students like Tay a chance to visit several major financial firms and spend time on the trading floor. At the conclusion of the trip, students benefited from Salant’s on-the-spot training through a review of their resumes, with a mock interview for the strongest candidate.

“It was incredible,” says Tay. “We were just college students but we were getting career counseling from a leader in the financial industry. The trip supplemented what Hopkins already offers, and made us ready to be com-petitive in this industry.”

Today Tay has come a long way from the freshman who joined the investment team out of curiosity. He is now an analyst on Wall Street, working for the Global Industries Group at Bank of America. He hopes to return to Homewood to give back, just as Salant has. “I’ve been really inspired by what Marshal has done for us,” says Tay. “I’m still kind of amazed at how I got here.” —Erin Baggett

Through the Student Investment Team made possible by Marshal L. Salant (below, left), Whiting School students get to manage a full investment portfolio, following its ups and downs on Wall Street.

“It was incredible…We were just college students but we were getting careercounseling from a leader in the financial industry.”

— Isaac tay ’07



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Providing Solutions for At-Risk PregnanciesBritni Crocker ’09 dreams of the difference her research may one day make—and that day may come sooner than she ever could have imagined.

In the fall of 2008, as part of the senior Biomedical Engineering Design Team course, Crocker led a research team of five undergradu-ates in creating a low-cost detection kit for preeclampsia, a condition that claims the lives of 75,000 pregnant women each year, primarily in developing countries. Though routinely diagnosed and treated in the United States through urine and blood pressure tests, the

urine test’s 60-cent price tag puts it out of reach for 90 percent of women in the developing world.

As design team leader for the project, spon-sored by Jhpiego (an international nonprofit health organization affiliated with Johns Hopkins), Crocker set goals and deadlines for design and production and served as liaison to Jhpiego. Field-testing for the team’s prototype, which costs less than one-third of a cent per test, began in Nepal this past spring. With Jhpiego serving more than 50 developing coun-tries, the test kit they’ve developed could save the lives of tens of thousands of women across the globe.

“One of the reasons I became an engineer was to design devices that help people,” says Crocker, who is excited by the plans for field-testing.

But her crucial role in the project was almost jeopardized. Just prior to her final year (she graduated early, completing her under-graduate course work in just three years), the Crocker family’s finances changed dramatically. “My family applied for financial aid knowing they might have to tell their daughter that the limit is anything less than the sky,” she recalls.

Then came welcome news: In addition to

receiving support from the Margareta E. Augustine Scholarship, Crocker had been named the first recipient of the Andrew and Dolores Bozzelli Endowed Scholarship, estab-lished by the late Andrew Bozzelli ’53, and his wife, Dolores, as well as through gifts made in Bozzelli’s memory by numerous trustees in an effort led by Wendell Smith ’54 and Robert Seder ’81. Bozzelli had been a full-scholarship student while majoring in mechanical engineer-ing. He went on to become an ardent supporter of Johns Hopkins, funding fellowships for bio-medical engineering students and serving as a university trustee, a trustee of the Johns Hopkins Health System Corporation, and an Advisory Council member for both the School of Medicine and the Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Institute.

With the Bozzelli Scholarship, a grateful Britni Crocker was able to complete her bio-medical engineering degree, lead her senior design project, and set her sights on her goal of developing devices that help repair brain dam-age—work inspired by her research in the com-putational neuroscience lab at the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute under the direc-tion of Michael I. Miller, the Hershel and Ruth Seder Professor of Biomedical Engineering. “We studied how the brain changes shape with different diseases, as part of a long-term goal of earlier detection of Alzheimer’s, bipolar disor-der, depression, and schizophrenia,” explains Crocker, who, as an undergraduate, garnered a prestigious internship at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany.

Reflecting on her experience at Johns Hopkins, Crocker says, “It has been wonderful for my engineering skills to have a real, imme-diate impact and for me to see people’s lives change as a result.” —Sarah Achenbach

Crocker led the student team that developed an inexpensive detection test for preeclamp-sia, now being field tested in Nepal.

“one of the reasonsI became an engineer was to design devices that help people.”

— Britni Crocker ’09

Students Explore Green Career options “This field is so new, you can’t read about it in a textbook or journal articles” said Karl Liggio ’96, ’01 PhD, as he welcomed guests to the March 5 Green Careers Panel and Networking Forum. “You need to talk to the people doing it.” And the 40 undergraduates and graduate students from across the Homewood campus in attendance were soon given the opportunity to do just that.

Co-sponsored by the Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA) and the Career Center, the event featured five panelists working in a variety of “green” fields who spoke about their own career paths and offered practical advice and job search tips. Liggio, a 10-year veteran of the energy industry and managing partner of Pharos Enterprise Intelligence, a consulting firm specializing in power plant management, served as the moderator.

Panelist Erica Barth ’08 had just landed her first job as a science writer and analyst in environmental communications at the Eastern Research Group, Inc., a consulting firm. She strongly encouraged students to participate in internships as a means to develop skills and define their specific interests. Christina Terpeluk ’05, an engineer at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, a design and consulting firm, told students, “Right now you need to collect the tools you’ll use when you go out in the world and solve problems.”

Additional panelists included Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Coalition to End Lead Paint Poisoning; Tommy Landers, a policy advocate for Environment Maryland; and Dan Norden, the director of environmen-tal management at Baltimore Gas & Electric.

If you would like to volunteer for a future career panel, please contact [email protected].


In memoriam

Andrew Paul Cox Jr., of Glen Allen, Virginia,

died Monday, April 13, 2009, after a brief ill-

ness. Born in Baltimore in 1937, he graduated

from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute in 1956

and from Johns Hopkins university with a BES

in electrical engineering and MS in manage-

ment science in 1959 and 1970, respectively.

An RoTC graduate, he served as a first lieuten-

ant in the Army Artillery after college, stationed

at fort Sill, oklahoma, and fort Hood, Texas,

in 1960.

He co-authored and received numerous

patents and designed computer circuits at

Westinghouse underseas Division from 1961

to 1967. He eventually became marketing

manager for IBM in Richmond, Virginia, from

1967 to 1980, before Data Systems Corpora-

tion hired him as president and CEo; he

served on the board there until the company

was sold to BISYS in 1989. Cox was hired by

Standard Register in Dayton, ohio, as general

manager and corporate vice president to run

the business systems division until he retired

in 1996.

He was awarded certification as a Certified

Management Consultant and became owner

and principal of Asset Protection Company, a

financial management consulting company.

At the time of his death, he was chairman of

the board of Spherix in Bethesda, Maryland.

Cox was an active member of the Johns

Hopkins university Whiting School of

Engineering National Advisory Council for 20

years. He was co-chair of the Class of 1959’s

50th reunion and was a charter member of

the Society of Engineering Alumni for the

Whiting School of Engineering. for his out-

standing service to the university, he received

the Johns Hopkins Alumni Heritage Award in

1995. The Andrew Paul Cox Scholarship in

electrical engineering was established by

Paul and his wife, Trudy, in 1987 in memory

of Paul’s father. The Paul Cox Laboratory is

located in Maryland Hall on the Homewood

campus.

“Paul was a remarkable man with a rare

generosity of spirit,” says Benjamin T. Rome

Dean Nick Jones. “His dedication to the

Whiting School was extraordinary and his

contributions too numerous to list. We were

fortunate to have him as part of the Whiting

School family and to have benefited from his

leadership and guidance.”

Heritage AwardEstablished in 1973, the Heritage Award honors alumni and friends of Johns Hopkins who have contributed outstanding service over an extended period to the progress of the university or the activities of the Alumni Association.

Warren E. Wilhide Sr. ’58 Warren E. Wilhide Sr. ’58 led a distinguished career in business con-sulting and manufac-turing engineering, operating his own firm, Warren & Associates, after serving as execu-tive director at Booz

Allen Hamilton, and senior vice president of Quantum Group International.

Wilhide has been a dedicated and involved alumnus for decades. He is committed to supporting students and has volunteered exten-sively for both the Whiting School and the university. He has been an effective mentor to the students he met.

As a member of the University Alumni Council, Wilhide serves on several committees, including Life Long Learning and Student Programs. He is also a member of the Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA) Student Outreach Committee. In addition, he has served as a judge for the Whiting School’s spa-ghetti bridge contest, and provided students with practical advice on their projects, greatly adding to the value of the program.

As a member of the 50th Reunion Committee for the Class of 1958, Wilhide tirelessly called classmates to encourage them to return for the reunion celebration and to support the university by contributing to their class gift. The Class of 1958 established a new Hopkins record for class gift participation. Sadly, Wilhide’s beloved wife, Carol, who had also been an enthusiastic supporter of Johns Hopkins, died shortly before the reunion in Spring 2008. Knowing how important his par-ticipation would have been to her, he followed through on plans to assist his class and also attend.

alumni awards


Wilhide is a veteran and served in Korea before attending Hopkins on the G.I. Bill. “I am very thankful for my good fortune with Hopkins, my wife, Carol, and our family, and for so many other things,” he says.

Louis M. Brown ’65A member of the Whiting School’s National Advisory Council (NAC) and chair of the NAC’s Finance Subcom-mittee, Louis M. Brown ’65 is an active and generous member

of the Whiting School alumni community.Brown, who is founder and CEO of

MICROS Systems in Columbia, Maryland, was one of the first individuals to support the Dean’s Leadership Fund, and he and his wife, Wendy, have established a graduate fellowship at the Whiting School in their name.

In addition to his role with MICROS, which supplies high-tech, point-of-sale systems to restaurants and other businesses in the hospi-tality industry, Brown is involved with Concentia Digital. The start-up company has expertise in digital media management, with a focus on bioinformatics. He also serves as chair-man of the board of Precision Auto Care. (Precision Auto Care Inc.’s affiliate, Precision Franchising LLC, is one of the world’s leading franchisers of auto care centers with 400 profes-sional service facilities in six countries.)

At events with alumni and friends of Johns Hopkins, Brown underscores the importance of staying connected to the Whiting School and supporting it financially. He credits his engi-neering education at Johns Hopkins with giv-ing him the problem-solving and critical- thinking abilities that have been so crucial to his success as an entrepreneur and businessman.

Distinguished Alumnus AwardEstablished in 1978, this award honors alumni who have typified the Johns Hopkins tradition of excellence and brought credit to the university by their personal accomplishment, professional achievement, or humanitarian service.

David C. Gakenheimer ’65, PhDDavid C. Gakenheimer ’65, PhD is the princi-pal developer of the Logicon Caries Detector, a ground-breaking image analysis software program that analyzes radiographs, looking for patterns of

tooth decay, or caries. The software allows den-tists to diagnose patients more accurately and provide early treatment before the decay leads to more serious problems. In 1998, Gakenheimer received a U.S. patent for the idea and received FDA approval. The Logicon Caries Detector is currently used in more than 3,000 dental offices.

After signing an exclusive distribution

agreement with PracticeWorks, a division of Eastman Kodak, Gakenheimer created his own business, GA Industries, to manufacture and further develop the Caries Detector. He later sold the product to Eastman Kodak and signed on as an employee, overseeing all sales and development of the product.

Prior to his work with the detector, Gakenheimer devoted most of his career to sensitive national defense projects. He made important discoveries into the effects of rain and cloud erosion on the front ends of missiles, and he advanced the study of high-powered lasers built to destroy missile boosters in flight. He has also created software aimed at training first responders in the management of mass casualties in the event of terrorist attacks using weapons of mass destruction. Other of Gakenheimer’s software innovations have focused on detecting weapons, explosives, and contraband drugs in airline luggage and ship containers, or concealed on individuals.

Gakenheimer received his bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics from Johns Hopkins; he also holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the California Institute of Technology.

Re-challenge yourself

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From April 17 to 19, about 4,000 alumni came to the Homewood campus for the annual homecoming celebration, where members of several classes also celebrated their reunion years. More than 75 events unfolded throughout the weekend, including the beloved crab cake lunch (some 1,998 cakes were served) and the Blue Jays 15-7 victory over Navy.

R. Andrew Ramelmeier, PhD ’84 (BS Chemical Engineering), shown here with the Blue Jay at the Dean’s Reunion Breakfast, celebrated his 25th reunion.

SEA Table: John Hass ’52, Tom Wilkins ’72, and Jack Schrodel ’57 represented the Society of Engineering Alumni (SEA) as they gave away peanuts before the game and sold Hopkins Engineering T-shirts to benefit the Student Initiatives Fund.

Homewood Bound: Reunion and Homecoming 2009

Blue Jay Brian Christopher (#19) and teammate Chris Boland share a celebratory moment during the Hopkins win over Navy.


Frank M. Krantz ’49 (BS Mechanical Engineering) celebrating his 60th reunion, is pictured here with his son Keith C. Krantz ’74 (Arts & Sciences) who was celebrating his 35th reunion.

Warren E. Wilhide Sr. ’58 (BS Industrial Engineering) is shown here at the Dean’s Reunion Breakfast with his daughter, Laura Hultguist, and her family.

Homewood Bound: Reunion and Homecoming 2009

President’s Welcome: On Saturday morning President Daniels addressed his first ever reunion crowd at his welcome. He is pictured here with Whiting School Dean Nicholas Jones, Arts and Sciences Dean Adam Falk, Alumni Association President Gerry Peterson ’64 NURS, and alumni and student representatives who presented the university with a check from all the reunion classes.

The Class of 1999, including (l to r) Matt Daimler ‘99 (BS Computer Engineering), Deron Charkoudian ‘99 (BS Mathematical Sciences) and, and Edward O’ Malley ‘99 (BS Mechanical Engineering) celebrated its 10th reunion.


New Professorships Reward World-Classfaculty Members

In the 2008–2009 academic year, the Whiting School was fortunate to inaugurate two endowed professorships, a way of recognizing oustanding faculty. Through their powerful contributions to research, teaching, and public service, our faculty are the cornerstone of the Whiting School’s research and academic excellence.

By providing an environment where scholars can actively pursue their interests with-out compromise and a culture that encourages interdisciplinary cooperation, the Whiting School has positioned itself as a national and international leader in engineering. To maintain this position of preeminence, we must continue to support and reward our world-class faculty. The most powerful way we can do this is through endowed professorships.

The Joseph R. and Lynn C. Reynolds Professorship was dedicated on December 5, 2008. Pictured here are Nicholas P. Jones, Benjamin T. Rome Dean; Lynn and Joe Reynolds ’69; and Peter Searson, the inaugural Reynolds Professor.

The Theodore M. and Kay W. Schad Professorship in Environmental Management was dedicated on April 23. Pictured here are M. Gordan Wolman ’49, B. Howell Griswold Professor of Geography and International Affairs; Richard E. Schuler, professor of economics and of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University; Benjamin F. Hobbs, the inaugural Schad Professor; Margot Cornwell, the widow of Theodore Schad; Edward J. Bouwer, chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering; and Nicholas P. Jones, Benjamin T. Rome Dean.

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Whiting School of Engineering National Advisory Council 2009

James L. Armitage, MS ’80 Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems

William R. Bowles ’60 Executive, IBM (Retired)

Louis M. Brown, Jr. ’65 Vice Chairman, Micros Systems, Inc.

Roderich M. Carr ’78 Former University Trustee Managing Director, MKP Capital

Neil L. Cohen ’83 Chairman, Emerald Development Managers LP

George C. Creel ’55 Executive Vice President, Baltimore Gas and Electric (Retired)

Anton T. Dahbura ’81, MS ’82, PhD ’84, Parent ’12 Corporate Vice President, Hub Labels Inc.

Gilbert F. Decker ’58 Executive Vice President of Engineering and Production, Walt Disney Imagineering (Retired) Consultant

Kenneth W. DeFontes, Jr. President and CEO, Baltimore Gas and Electric

Loren R. Douglass ’86, MS ’95 Former University Trustee Director, Office of the COO, Merrill Lynch and Company

Bahaa W. Fam ’79, MS ’80 Private Investor

Janie M. Fouke, PhD Senior Advisor to the President for International Affairs, University of Florida

Charles Goldstein, MS ’68, PhD Vice President-Research, Becton Dickinson and Company

Ronald L. Gue ’60, PhD ’64 Chairman, Phoenix Health Systems, Inc.

Allan S. Huston, Jr. ’66 Co-Chairman, Tri-J Capital Partners

F. Suzanne Jenniches, MS ’79 Vice President and General Manager, Government Systems Division, Northrop Grumman Corporation

Paul J. Kadri ’87 Superintendent, Groton Public Schools

Harvey D. Kushner ’51 President, Kushner Management Planning Corporation

Gilbert V. Levin ’47, MS ’48, PhD ’63 Adjunct Professor, Beyond Center, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ Honorary Professor, Cardiff University, Wales, UK Founder and Director, Spherix Inc., Bethesda, MD

Mr. Kwok-Leung Li ’79 University Trustee President and CEO, RioRey, Inc.

F. Pierce Linaweaver ’55, PhD ’65 University Trustee Emeritus Consulting Environmental and Civil Engineer (Retired)

Maria Maroulis ’96, MS ’01 Former University Young Trustee Business Manager, Synthes USA

Aristides Melissaratos ’66 Senior Advisor to the President for Enterprise Development, Johns Hopkins University

Terry F. Neimeyer, MS ’80 CEO and Chairman, KCI Technologies

George D. Pillari ’84 Managing Director, Alvarez & Marshal Healthcare Industry Group

Ramanarayan V. Potarazu, MS ’86, Parent ’06 CEO, Avail Media

Joseph R. Reynolds, Jr. ’69 University Trustee President and CEO, RTI Group, LLC

Walter L. Robb, PhD Senior Vice President of Corporate Research and Development, General Electric (Retired) President, Vantage Management, Inc.

Marshal L. Salant ’80 University Trustee Managing Director, Citigroup

Robert A. Seder, PhD ’81 University Trustee Chief, Cellular Immunology Section, Vaccine Research Center, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Rajendra D. Singh, PhD University Trustee School of Medicine Trustee Founder and President, Telcom Ventures

Michael G. Stolarik ’73 President and COO, QinetiQ North America

William F. Ward, Jr. ’67 University Trustee President and CEO, Ward Machinery (Retired)

Linton Wells II, MS ’73, PhD ’75, Parent ’08 Distinguished Research Professor, National Defense University

W. Daniel White ’74 Executive Vice President, The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company

Emeritus Members

Willard Hackerman ’38 Former University Trustee President and CEO, Whiting-Turner Contracting Company

Mark E. Rubenstein ’62, MS ’65 University Trustee Chairman, Rubenstein Company

Herschel L. Seder ’39 University Trustee Emeritus Milwaukee Valve, Inc. (Retired)


Final ExamThe dozen or so Hopkins students, a few parents, siblings, and assorted others lugged “Twitter-Jay” past brick row houses on Baltimore’s Kenwood Avenue in the early afternoon of May 2. Although spirits were high, the day was getting hot, the enormous blue jay heavy, and everyone—even the 300-pound bird—looked a little weary. After all, they’d been racing for six hours and still had to make it through Patterson Park’s obstacle course and over five miles of Baltimore streets before they’d reach the finish line.

Twitter-Jay and the Recyclists were among 26 entrants in the 11th annual Kinetic Sculpture Race. This test of artistry, engineering, and endurance, sponsored by Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum, requires that teams build amphibious, human-powered works of art that are capable of traveling over 15 miles of pave-ment, through sand and mud traps, and in the Inner Harbor. Twitter-Jay, the Homewood campus’s first entry in the race, was conceived of and built over the course of the academic year by graduate and undergraduate Hopkins students in Engineering and Arts and Sciences.

“Designing and building, finding materials, figuring out all the details—it was a lot more work

than I expected,” says Nora Krinitsky ’09, a history major and the team’s organizer. “And we couldn’t have done it without the engineering students’ technical knowledge. This was a great example of what can happen when Hopkins students have the chance to combine their expertise.”

Everything the students built worked exactly as planned. Constructed mainly out of recycled materials—wings made from thousands of blue plastic bags, a bamboo and electrical conduit infrastructure modeled on “buckyballs” (C60 molecules) held together with zip ties, and giant Pepsi barrel pontoons—the blue jay also housed a high-tech communications center that enabled the team to text and “tweet” its fol-lowers while providing GPS data and live video feed. The materials the students didn’t scavenge were purchased with funds from a Homewood Arts Innovation Grant and a Creative use of Technology Grant from the Digital Media Center.

Among their major purchases were two $50 bicycles they had welded to the frame that supported the blue jay. And this, it turns out, was their downfall. As the Recyclists passed the National Aquarium, the bike wheels buckled and Twitter-Jay collapsed.

The Twitter-Jay team enters the murky waters of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

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Rather than give up, the group quickly decided to jettison their electronics, paddle wheels, and all other nonessential equipment. Except for the requisite dip in the Inner Harbor (for which they used their required emergency oars), they carried Twitter-Jay the entire way.

As they approached Patterson Park, families and friends gathered on marble stoops to witness the spectacle, shouting words of encouragement as the students trudged by. And Tabor Barrante, the sophomore mechanical engi-neering major who had led the bird’s art team and designed its infrastructure, waved from her bicycle seat perch.

That evening, at the museum’s closing ceremony, the Hopkins team proudly accepted the Golden Dinosaur Award, the prize given to the first sculpture to break down or have the most memo-rable failure.

David Hung, the materials science and engineering graduate student responsible for overseeing the sculpture’s balance, flotation, and other critical calculations, had an explanation for what happened: “Hopkins has great engineering. We just didn’t have enough engineers.”

— Abby Lattes

will

Gift Planning experts at Johns Hopkins can furnish information about tax-wise giving, which you can share with your estate advisor, and provide sample language for a bequest to the Whiting School of Engineering. When you are ready, please contact us.

John C. Jeppi, Gift Planning AdvisorJohns Hopkins Institutions 410-516-7954 or 800-548-1268 [email protected] www.jhu.plannedgifts.org

If you have already included the Whiting School of Engineering in your estate plans, but have not notified us, we would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

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