Joel S. Bader, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, is a leading innovator in genomics and biotechnology. His research explores the connection between genotype and phenotype, relating an organism’s genetic material to its observable characteristics.

Bader develops new computational methods to define how inborn genetic variants and acquired mutations lead to disease, primarily complex genetic disorders and cancer, with the goal of identifying new therapeutic targets. He also leads synthetic biology projects that design and build entire chromosomes and genomes to create new forms of life. He also leads an effort to create cells that rely on RNA (ribonucleic acid) rather than DNA for their genetic information. In related efforts, Bader’s lab develops technologies for biosafety and biosecurity, preventing the escape of engineered life and identifying evidence of genetic engineering in DNA samples.

Alexis Battle, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and computer science at Johns Hopkins University, specializes in unlocking secrets of the human genome by analyzing large-scale genomic sequencing data to understand the impact of genetic variation on the human body. She is a 2016 Searle Scholar.

Battle’s research is concentrated on the development of computational biology tools and machine-learning strategies to examine genetic differences in gene regulation and disease. A leading member of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Consortium, she focuses on predicting the effects of variation in noncoding DNA sequences.  Findings of her work on a GTEx project, which studied how genetic patterns lead to molecular changes within specific tissues, were published in 2017 in the journal Nature.

Sarah Szanton is the fifth dean of the Johns Hopkin School of Nursing.

A number of years ago, while making house calls as a nurse practitioner to homebound, low-income elderly patients in West Baltimore, Dr. Szanton noticed that their environmental challenges were often as pressing as their health challenges. Since then she has developed a program of research at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing on the role of the environment and stressors in health disparities in older adults, particularly those trying to “age in place” or stay out of a nursing home. The result is a program called CAPABLE, which combines handyman services with nursing and occupational therapy to improve mobility, reduce disability, and decrease healthcare costs. She has tested the program’s effectiveness through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Innovations Office at the Center on Medicaid and Medicare Services. She has major funding from the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation to build infrastructure for the CAPABLE program. She has also conducted a study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, of whether food and energy assistance improve health outcomes for low-income older adults. A former health policy advocate, Dr. Szanton aims her research and publications toward changing policy for older adults and their families.

Alba Azola, M.D., is a rehabilitation physician helping patients restore function and movement after an injury or illness. Her expertise includes neurorehabilitation and rehabilitation for swallowing disorders.

Dr. Azola completed her residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, where in her final year she was awarded the Frank L. Coulson, Jr. Award for Clinical Excellence. Prior to the residency, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Swallowing Neurophysiology Laboratory at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Ann Marie Parker is an instructor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her clinical focus is in pulmonary and critical care medicine, with a special interest in critically ill oncology patients as well as delirium and rehabilitation in the ICU. Dr. Parker joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2016.

She earned her M.D. at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She completed her residency at the University of Maryland Medical Center and a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins.

David Broniatowski conducts research in decision-making under risk, group decision-making, system architecture, and behavioral epidemiology. This research program draws upon a wide range of techniques including formal mathematical modeling, experimental design, automated text analysis and natural language processing, social and technical network analysis, and big data. Current projects include a text network analysis of transcripts from the US Food and Drug Administration’s Circulatory Systems Advisory Panel meetings, a mathematical formalization of Fuzzy Trace Theory — a leading theory of decision-making under risk, derivation of metrics for flexibility and controllability for complex engineered socio-technical systems, and using Twitter data to conduct surveillance of influenza infection and the resulting social response.

Lilliana Mason is an SNF Agora Institute Associate Professor of Political Science. She is author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press).

She received her PhD in political psychology from Stony Brook University and her BA in politics from Princeton University. Her research on partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization has been published in journals such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior, and featured in media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Facebook Research Integrity Group, and the Democracy Fund.

Jeffrey Kahn, PhD, MPH, is the Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, a position he assumed in July 2016. From 2011, he has been the inaugural Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy.  He is also Professor in the Dept. of Health Policy and Management of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  He works in a variety of areas of bioethics, exploring the intersection of ethics and health/science policy, including human and animal research ethics, public health, and ethical issues in emerging biomedical technologies.

Dr. Chute is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics, Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing at Johns Hopkins University, and Chief Research Information Officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Clinical Informatics, he is currently president of ACMI.

His career has focused on how we can represent clinical information to support analyses and inferencing, including comparative effectiveness analyses, decision support, best evidence discovery, and translational research. He has had a deep interest in semantic consistency, harmonized information models, and ontology. His current research focuses on translating basic science information to clinical practice, and how we classify dysfunctional phenotypes (disease).

Dr. Philip Graff is a senior data scientist and the Chief Data and Analytics Officer of the Decision Systems Group at the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory. He earned his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge on a Gates-Cambridge Scholarship, working on data analysis that contributed to the detection of gravitational waves. He then held a post-doctoral fellowship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, applying Bayesian data analysis and machine learning to astrophysics. He has been working at APL for six years, leading and contributing to a wide variety of data science and machine learning projects in support of the US government. For the past two years, he has been deputy lead and now lead of the Operations team at APL supporting the national COVID-19 response.