Research has been part of sophomore Ethan Posner’s life since high school, prompting him to dive deeper during his time at Hopkins. A Biophysics major, Posner is a member of the Fleming Lab, where he has investigated Outer Membrane Proteins (OMPs) for the past year and a half.
On Monday, Nov. 27, postdoctoral fellow Kiara Eldred from the Thomas Reh Lab at the University of Washington gave a talk titled "Visualizing Progenitor Cell Trajectories in the Developing Human Retina" for the Department of Biology.
As we are approaching finals season, let’s take some time to acknowledge the hard work of scientists around the world and learn from their commitment to their work. This week’s science news covers new insights into the monkeypox virus in Congo, robots made of human cells, archaeological preservation in Ukraine and an AI-robot that can predict and synthesize new materials.
In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI), understanding and improving AI security is increasingly crucial. Yuchen Yang, a third-year doctoral student advised by Yinzhi Cao, employed an automated attack framework to reveal the vulnerabilities in text-to-image generative models such as DALL·E 3 and Stable Diffusion. The paper, “SneakyPrompt: Evaluating Robustness of Text-to-image Generative Models' Safety Filters,” formerly titled “SneakyPrompt: Jailbreaking Text-to-image Generative Models,“ will be presented at the 45th Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Craig-Schwartz works in a pediatric oncology lab under Dr. Michael Koldobskiy, whose research focuses on diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), an aggressive and fatal form of brain cancer that occurs almost exclusively in children. The lab is currently working on developing new drugs to combat the tumor as well as studying the epigenetic mechanisms of how the development of the tumor is regulated.
On Tuesday, Nov. 7, Peng Jiang, a Stadtman investigator for the Cancer Data Science Laboratory, held a talk discussing the role of big data approaches in studying intercellular signaling — specifically, how cancers evade immune system function in humans. The talk was titled “Big Data Approaches to Study Intercellular Signaling During Tumor Immune Evasion” and was hosted by the Institute for Computational Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Hopkins.
With Thanksgiving approaching, we can all take a moment to be grateful for the beauty of scientific discovery. This week has brought images from the Euclid Space Telescope, biological chimeras and yet another superconductivity controversy.
On Tuesday, Nov. 7, the Johns Hopkins Health Policy Forum invited Chairman, CEO and President of Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) Tom Polen to share his insights into the current state of global health care and BD’s role in it. Polen was joined by Dean of Carey Business School Alex Triantis.
Aimon Rahman, a third-year doctoral student in the Vision & Image Understanding (VIU) Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, is making significant contributions to the field of medical artificial intelligence (AI). In her Hopkins Engineering Applications and Research Tutorials (HEART) course titled "Introduction to Deep Learning for Medical Imaging," Rahman introduces students to the practical applications of computer vision in medical image analysis.
In everyday life, we all make choices based on the information available to us. These decisions range from life-changing acts to the minutiae of existence. The question we answer, consciously or not, is whether or not we have enough data on which to act, or if we need to gain more information before doing so. This question is called the explore/exploit trade-off.
As we enter the November stretch of the semester, researchers around the world are also working hard to advance efforts that can be beneficial to human health. This week’s science news highlights endeavors to understand various health challenges and identify treatments to combat them.
On Friday, Oct. 27, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering hosted a seminar featuring Executive Director of Development Engineering and Chemistry Process Development at Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) Jean Tom, an accomplished chemical engineer with a distinguished career in the pharmaceutical industry. The seminar provided students with insights into entering the workforce and addressing challenges in their careers.
The Public Health Student Forum (PHSF) held an open discussion on environmental safety and sustainability in Baltimore on Oct. 29. The event featured a conversation on the efficacy of Hopkins composting, water safety in light of the recent Cryptosporidium contamination, how institutions can build trust with the Baltimore community and the importance of engaging in local politics.
I opened the incubator door, and a familiar whiff of an earthy, repulsive odor attacked my nostrils. I held my breath and slowly took out a stack of yellow gel plates covered with small white dots. This could be the day, I hoped to myself. This was just another round of mutation screening, trying to find that one special bacterial colony with that one specific mutation that could prove our hypothesis.
The Department of Biology hosted a seminar on Thursday, Oct. 26 featuring Alison Xie, an assistant research professor of surgery-urology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The talk, titled “Glial-Neuron Interactions in Sensory Ganglia Alleviate the Symptoms of Chronic Pain in Mice,” discussed Xie’s research on how Gq-GPCR activation in satellite glial cells (SGCs) of the sensory ganglia can produce analgesic effects in mouse models.
Nilanjan Chatterjee, a professor of biostatistics and genetic epidemiology at the School of Medicine and also recognized as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, collaborated on a machine-learning model that would improve the predictive ability of polygenic risk scores in non-European populations. This research, a collaboration with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Haoyu Zhang from the National Cancer Institute, was recently published in Nature Genetics.
It’s spooky season, and the following scientific findings sure are a treat! Scientific news this week ranges from as microscopic as gut microbiome to as macroscopic as Mars.
As we hop back into school after Fall Break, let’s review some of the biggest headlines in science. This week features stories about malaria vaccines, weight loss drugs, gravitational wave observations and lithium-ion batteries.
Rajiv McCoy, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, and his collaborators at London Women’s Clinic in the U.K. discovered a strong correlation between chromosome abnormalities, embryo arrest and low blastocyst morphological grading of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) of human preimplantation embryos. Their results were recently published in Genome Medicine.
Orion Weller is a third-year doctoral student affiliated with the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) advised by Benjamin Van Durme and Dawn Lawrie. He is currently teaching a Hopkins Engineering Applications and Research Tutorials (HEART) course titled Reasoning with ChatGPT in which he discusses the contexts and relevance of his research.
