麻豆传媒

Professor Hertz has taught at Wellesley College for 35 years in both the sociology and women鈥檚 and gender studies departments. She teaches courses on the contemporary reproduction, changing families and social inequalities, global families and social policies, the social construction of gender, and women鈥檚 leadership at work.  She also teaches a first year seminar on 鈥淭he Body.鈥� Hertz believes that working independently and individually with students is one of the hallmarks of a small college and her favorite way of teaching and sharing knowledge.  She always has undergraduate research assistants on her projects.

Hertz is known for her research on the intersection of families, work and gender. For the past 25 years, she has focused on the emergence of new family forms and how they expand our understanding of kinship. She is especially interested in how the Internet is revolutionizing the choices people make as they enter into third-party reproduction arrangements (e.g. sperm and egg donor use) and also how the Internet has become a site of new possibilities for connection between genetic relatives.   Her 2006 book, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice captured popular attention with its finding that the age-old desire for motherhood was in fact reinforced by new scientific advances in reproduction. Her new book, Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings and the Creation of New Kin, with her coauthor Margaret K. Nelson, examines the contemporary interplay of genetics, social interaction, and culture expectations in the formation of web-based donor sibling kin groups. A new set of complexities emerge as donor siblings attempt to expand our understanding of kinship. (Oxford University Press 2019). 

She continues her focus on how social inequality at home and in the workplace shape the experiences of women and men. Her first book, More Equal than Others: Women and Men in Dual-Career Marriages and also Working Families (edited with Nancy Marshall) address inequalities that persist between spouses and within the broader economy and how people attempt to resolve them.   Most recently, she is interested in the pivotal moments that influence the behavior of women as leaders and how they stretch their thinking about what is possible, often resisting and productively 鈥渂reaking rules.鈥�

Hertz has had a long-standing interest in social science methodology. This includes new conventions in data collection and ethnographic writing. For example, Random Families  presents an innovative way to study donor sibling networks. In this research the researchers crisscrossed the U.S. in order to gather in-person interviews and technology based interviews with over 350 parents, children and sometimes the children鈥檚 donor who are genetically related. In other books and articles she addresses issues of reflexivity and voice as well as studies of elites.  In addition, she has edited several volumes about how social scientist autobiographical accounts influence their research. She is the former editor of Qualitative Sociology.

Hertz received her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Most recently she has held appointments at Harvard鈥檚 Law School in the Petrie-Flem Center and at the Brocher Foundation in Switzerland. Most recently the National Science Foundation and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation have funded her research.

She is frequently quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, 麻豆传媒week, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe. She appears in the broadcast media commenting on social problems for local news specials.

I came to Wellesley straight out of my PhD program in the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1993 to develop courses in Asian American women's and gender studies鈥攚hich remains my personal, intellectual, and theoretical passion. 
 
My research and teaching have long engaged with questions of the representation of Asian American women from the silent film era to the pop culture phenomenon known as #AsianAugust 2019.  My first two books, Imagining Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (NYU Press, 2004) and Following Her Own Road: Min茅 Okubo (University of Washington Press 2008) focus on the gendered legacy of wartime Japanese American internment camp experience in art, culture, and historical American memory.
 
More recently, I spent eight years doing archival research on Japanese women and photography that was a pure labor of love. Shadow Traces examines visual archives of four groups of Japanese/American women from the early to mid-twentieth century in America. My analyses include photographs of indigenous Japanese Ainu women at the 1904 St. Louis World鈥檚 Fair, picture brides at the turn of the century, photographs of the incarceration of the Japanese-American population during WWII, and a postwar picture album kept by my own Japanese war bride mother. My study builds a case for understanding the influential role of photographic archives in shaping Asian/American women鈥檚 history.
 
When people ask me, 鈥淲hat do you teach?鈥� I enjoy confounding them with my long and eclectic list of courses that include: Elvis Presley, Techno-Orientalism, Asian Women in Film, and Rainbow Cowboys and Cowgirls (a multicultural approach to the history of the American West). Right now, I鈥檓 in the early stages of planning a new interdisciplinary course that will be called 鈥淲omen and Horses.鈥�
 
Twenty-three years ago, my colleague, good friend (and apparently a prophet), Geeta Patel said, 鈥淐reef, you really need to develop a research project on horses.鈥� I remember asking her at the time, 鈥渂ut what would that even look like?鈥�  I had no idea that it would take me two decades to launch myself headlong into the world of sacred Lakota horse rides and communities in the Dakotas. Since I started this journey in 2013, I have never looked back.  These days, I literally follow the change of seasons according to the schedule of sacred Lakota prayer rides I鈥檝e been privileged to support and participate on that include The Future Generations Ride (formerly known as The Chief Big Foot Ride) to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the Victory Ride to commemorate the Battle at Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) in Montana, the Dakota 38 Ride in Mankato, Minnesota, and the recent ride to Fort Laramie, Wyoming to observe the 150 year anniversary of the signing of the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty.
 
My hope is that by working in partnership with my Lakota friends, we can produce some invaluable documentation of these rides that can be shared in public form鈥攁s podcasts, photo-essays, and as a book that can be used for teaching Native youth about this rich history and legacy.

My research focuses on risk and resilience factors that protect against developmental psychopathology in childhood and adolescence, with a specific emphasis on gender issues. Within this broad rubric, my current area of research examines factors that put girls at risk for negative outcomes in adolescence. Specifically, I examined the construct of authenticity in relationships, which is a risk factor for developmental psychopathology, and may be manifested in subsequent psychopathology. However, authenticity in relationships can also be understood as a protective factor against developing psychopathology. My recent thesis students have examined authenticity in relationships as a risk factor for disordered eating, and early childhood trauma as a risk factor for lower levels of authenticity in relationships.

I teach a variety of courses, including Introduction to Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Child and Family Psychopathology, and Research Methods in Abnormal Psychology. I also supervise students who participate in our Psychology Department Practicum program; recently students have interned at Riverside Community Care and at Germaine Lawrence, among other sites. Our practicum program allows students to get intensive applied experiences in psychology.

I am a licensed clinical psychologist, and enjoy integrating material from my clinical work, teaching, and research.

My research engages with core issues in international security, and in particular the study of the causes and conduct of war. For example, my book, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland, asks how territory becomes indivisible: Why is it politicians appear unable to divide territory through negotiation, leading to violence and war? Currently, I am researching whether concerns about legitimacy affect states' decisions to balance power鈥攆or example, if the United States' position as the lone superpower depends on whether or not the international community sees its foreign policy as legitimate.

Along with my introductory courses to world politics and international security, I teach an advanced lecture course called Weapons, Strategy, and War, which examines how the interaction among politics, culture, and technology affects the conduct of war. I teach another seminar that explores the rise and fall of great power politics. In general, I hope to engage my students with questions of why wars occur, how wars are fought, and how war shapes, and is shaped by, political processes. Beyond these substantive interest, I'm particularly interested in promoting student research in political science. I currently act as our department's honors thesis coordinator, and have been thrilled to work with Wellesley's students on my own research, both employing them as research assistants and working with them as co-authors on projects.

Outside of Wellesley, I am a member of the Governing Council of the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association, the primary organizational body for international relations scholars.

When I'm not talking or writing about conflict, you can find me backpacking the western United States. Yosemite is our current favorite backpacking spot, and my husband and I are eager to introduce our baby daughter to the backcountry as soon as possible.

Most of my research has been concentrated on exploring and describing the relationships that some preschool-aged children have with imaginary companions. The phenomenon of imaginary companions has not received a great deal of attention in the psychological literature and is not well understood, so one goal of my research is to provide a definitive description of pretend friends with an eye toward how they might function in development. Studying the ways in which children talk about, and sometimes interact with, imaginary companions has the potential to illuminate how young children understand and think about social relationships in general. My hope is that by thinking about imaginary companions as relationship partners, I may be able to figure out how they function within children鈥檚 social networks. Such information could lead to a better understanding of why some children create them and their functional significance in development.

I teach courses in introductory and developmental psychology as well as research methods in developmental psychology, in which students conduct projects at the Wellesley College Child Study Center. At the advanced level, I teach seminars on early relationships and social imagination (the ways in which we use our imaginations to help us regulate and understand our relationships). I have also supervised numerous independent study and thesis students, and I greatly enjoy these mentoring opportunities.

In addition to my work on imaginary companions, I work in the area of moral development with a colleague at Notre Dame, Dr. Darcia Narvaez. Dr. Narvaez and I have published a few papers on children鈥檚 understanding of moral texts, and along with several other colleagues we are investigating the match (or mismatch) between current parenting practices and those characteristic of the environment in which human beings evolved. We are concerned that large deviations from the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, as Bowlby called it, may result in developmental compromise, particularly in the domain of morality.

In my free time, I play the oboe with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, and mostly I enjoy spending time with my husband and small but sprightly boy/girl twins. Contrary to popular belief, I am not currently conducting any at-home twin studies.

Along with many publications in academic journals and edited volumes, I am the author of Sex and Consequences: Abortion, Public Policy, and the Economics of Fertility, co-editor of Targeting Investments in Children: Fighting Poverty When Resources are Limited, and co-author of Reconsidering Retirement: How Losses and Layoffs Affect Older Workers. My latest book, A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students - and Universities analyzes the system of pricing in higher education and the ways that we can change it to improve access. I am also founder and CEO of MyinTuition Corp., which operates the MyinTuition simplified financial aid calculator available at MyinTuition.org. It is currently being used at dozens of colleges and universities. I am also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The focus of my research spills over into my teaching activities. I emphasize statistical and econometric methods in my own work and bring these interests to the classroom. I am a core member of the group of faculty in the Economics Department who teach the courses Introduction to Probability and Statistics and Econometric Methods. A key component of these classes is applying statistical analysis to real-world problems. My upper-level course, Economic Analysis of Social Policy, even more specifically targets my research interests.

Kellie Carter Jackson is a 19th century historian in the Department of Africana Studies. Her new book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the conditions that led some black abolitionists to believe slavery might only be abolished by violent force.

Carter Jackson is co-editor of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, & Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press). With a forward written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Reconsidering Roots is the first scholarly collection of essays devoted entirely to understanding the remarkable tenacity of the film鈥檚 visual, cultural, and political influence on American history. Carter Jackson and Erica Ball have also edited a Special Issue on the 40th Anniversary of Roots for Transition Magazine (Issue 122}. Carter Jackson was also featured in the History Channel's documentary, 鈥淩oots: A History Revealed鈥� which was nominated for a NAACP Image Award in 2016.

She teaches the following courses:

African American History from 1500- Present
Black Women's History
Understanding American Slavery and Film
Introduction to the Black Experience
Women and Slavery in the Transatlantic World

Carter Jackson's essays have been featured in The Atlantic, Transition Magazine, The Conversation, Boston鈥檚 NPR Blog Cognoscenti, AAIHS鈥檚 Black Perspectives blog, and Quartz, where her article was named one of the top 13 essays of 2014. She has also been interviewed for the New York Times, Al Jazeera International, Slate, The Telegraph, CBC, and Radio One. Carter Jackson also sits on the board for Transition Magazine where other essays of hers have been published.

Before coming to Wellesley College, Carter Jackson was a Harvard College Fellow in the Department of African & African American Studies at Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D in American History at Columbia University working under the esteemed historian Eric Foner. She enjoys spending time with her husband and kids, traveling, trying new foods, and binge watching her favorite TV shows!

My scholarship and teaching illuminate how local and global dynamics of culture and the economy reflect and challenge one another. In the two major research projects that have defined my scholarship so far, I have examined the institutional contexts of work, finance, and international development in the geographical contexts of urban India, the U.S., and South Africa. In my classroom and in my writing, am particularly attentive to how contemporary forms of racial, caste, class, and gender inequality are products of the interconnected legacies of colonialism and slavery. My methodological preference for fine-grained ethnography and interviews, and my theoretical bent towards the world-systemic dynamics of economy and culture link, at every turn, the individual/personal with the public, the social, and the political.

 

My new book, Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India, examines the taken-for-granted practices and institutional arrangements of commercial microfinance institutions in urban India, a sector that reaches over 40 million poor and working class women through small, high-interest loans. Through interviews and ethnographic work in India and the United States, this project investigates how exploitative financial practices expand to vulnerable populations while ensuring profit for lending institutions. I pay close attention to the relationships between loan officers and working women clients. Developing the notion of a gendered microfinance chain, I show how commercial microfinance institutions, with the support of the state, extract financial and reputational value from working class women to more powerful groups in the industry, especially privileged men.

 

I have just completed an edited volume with Dr. Gowri Vijayakumar, Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries (forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan). This volume envisions how the discipline of sociology may be transformed when we place the region of South Asia at the center of our empirical analyses. In addition, I am currently working on a new book with Dr. Cinzia Solari that examines the gender order of neoliberalism, with comparative examinations of South and Southeast Asia, the U.S., and the former Soviet Union.
 

My first book, Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a Transnational Class was a multi-sited ethnographic examination of transnational Indian information technology (IT) workers. Prior to this book, I studied the cultural politics of post-apartheid South Africa, based on extensive research with South African Indian communities in Durban and its surrounding townships.

 

At Wellesley, I teach courses that examine globalization, race, gender, and diaspora studies, among other topics. My courses offer students an opportunity to think deeply about social difference in the context of an interconnected, albeit fragmented world. I have produced the following massively open online courses on the edX platform: Global Sociology, Global Inequality, and Global Social Change. The educational materials I developed for these courses, including onsite lectures and interviews with prominent scholars, have reached thousands of learners around the world, and I continue to integrate them into my on-campus teaching at Wellesley. 

 

I am a strong advocate for anti-racist transformation in our education system. At Wellesley, I have served on numerous committees to advance the goals of inclusive excellence on our campus. As a Natick parent, I promote diverse books in public schools through education and advocacy.

 

Alongside my academic life, I perform and promote classical and contemporary Indian dance forms, especially Bharatanatyam. In 2015, I established NATyA Dance in Natick, which includes a performance collective as well as classes for children and adults. 

I study race and ethnicity in American politics. Within this broad field, I focus on White racial attitudes generally and the attitude of racial sympathy - defined as White distress over Black suffering - specifically. Racial sympathy is a distinct, but understudied, White racial attitude with important political consequences. Using multiple methods including survey research, experimental studies, participant observation, and long-form interviews, my book project examines the origins and depths of this phenomena as well as the conditions that give rise to its political expression. My 2021 article in the Journal of Politics summarizes this work. I have also published research on guilt and prejudice among White Americans.

My research has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post/Monkey Cage, Vox, The Nation, Mother Jones, and Salon.com. I have also provided commentary on race and American politics in the New York Times, NPR's Code Switch and Fivethirtyeight.com.

At Wellesley, I teach courses related to American politics, race and politics, political psychology, and research methods. All of my courses, regardless of title, focus on the role of race and ethnicity in American politics.

I grew up in a multiracial and interfaith household. Prior to graduate school, I worked in politics and have experience at the federal, state, and local levels of American government. I was also a Fulbright Grantee in South Korea. Outside of academics, I enjoy watching plays and musicals and spending time with my daughters.

Dr. James Berger is the director of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, professor of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of the Cancer Chemical and Structural Biology Program for the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. His research focuses on how multi-subunit assemblies use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) for transferring energy within the chromosome and controlling the flow of genetic information. Dr. Berger has a twenty year history of studying the fundamental mechanisms of enzymes that control cell proliferation and small molecule inhibitors that target such systems.

Dr. Berger received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Utah. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and completed a fellowship at the Whitehead Institute at MIT.

Dr. Berger works with a number of graduate programs at Johns Hopkins and oversees a busy lab. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

Prof. Spangler鈥檚 research aims to expand the repertoire of protein therapeutics by redesigning naturally occurring proteins and engineering new molecules to overcome the deficiencies of existing drugs. Integrating cutting-edge tools from structural biophysics, biomolecular engineering, and translational immunology, her research focuses on developing innovative platforms for the discovery and design of proteins that recruit novel mechanisms for disease therapy. In particular, Spangler鈥檚 group is interested in engineering antibody-based molecules that reshape immune cell behavior for targeted treatment of cancer, infectious diseases, and autoimmune disorders. The overarching goal of her interdisciplinary research program is to establish new insights into protein behavior and the extent to which it can be manipulated for medically relevant applications.

Dr. Sujatha Kannan is an associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She specializes in pediatric critical care. In addition to her role at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Kannan is also a research scientist at the Hugo Moser Researcher Institute at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Dr. Kannan completed her medical training at the Jawaharlal Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research in Pondicherry, India. She conducted residencies in pediatrics at the University Illinois at Chicago and the Children鈥檚 Hospital of Michigan. Additionally, she completed a fellowship in pediatric critical care medicine at the Children鈥檚 Hospital of Michigan. Dr. Kannan joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2011.

Her research focuses on imaging and targeted therapy for perinatal brain injury using nanotechnology, with a special emphasis on cerebral palsy and autism.

Dr. Kannan is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Academy of Pediatrics. She has published extensively and has won several awards for her research. She is board certified in pediatrics and pediatric critical care.

Christy Wyskiel is the Senior Advisor to the President of Johns Hopkins University for Innovation & Entrepreneurship. In this role, she also serves as the Executive Director of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the division of the university responsible for technology transfer, industry research partnerships, and company incubation under the brand 鈥楩astForward.鈥�  Since her appointment in 2013, Christy has transformed the culture of commercialization at Johns Hopkins, opening 43,000 square feet of FastForward innovation space to support startup companies, facilitating the creation of 160 companies, and generating $404 million in university revenue from licensing and industry collaborations. Johns Hopkins University startups have raised more than $3 billion in venture capital during her tenure. Christy is a fierce advocate for the future of Baltimore and the role that Johns Hopkins University can play in populating the city skyline with companies borne, built and grown locally.

Christy is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and ecosystem builder with 25 years of experience primarily focused on the life sciences and healthcare industries.  Prior to her role at Johns Hopkins, Christy co-founded two Baltimore based startups and served as a formal and informal advisor to many others.  Prior to that, Christy worked as an institutional investor where she had a long track record of successful investing in both public and private companies.

Christy has a BA in Economics and German from Williams College and an MBA in Accounting and Finance from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Dr. Jeremy Nathans is a professor of molecular biology and genetics, neuroscience and ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focuses on molecular mechanisms of visual system development, function, and disease.

Dr. Nathans is responsible for landmark discoveries that have changed our understanding of how humans see the world. His investigations into the mechanisms that allow us to see colors led him to identify the genes that code for color-vision receptors in the light-sensing cones of the retina. This breakthrough finding allowed him to show that variations in these genes cause color blindness. His work has also led to new understandings of the development, function and survival of the retina.

Dr. Nathans received his undergraduate degree in Life Sciences and Chemistry from MIT and earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and M.D. from Stanford University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Genentech, Inc. Dr. Nathans joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1988.

He serves on the editorial board of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is on many scientific advisory boards including The Foundation Fighting Blindness and Merck Research Laboratories. He became a member of the Institute of Medicine in 2011 and his work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience by the McGovern Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Borahay is the Director of Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgery at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. He specializes in robotic and laparoscopic surgeries for complex conditions, including uterine fibroids and advanced endometriosis. Dr. Borahay performs single-site gynecologic surgery and same-day hysterectomy.

Dr. Borahay's book Fibroids and Reproduction presents recent updates on fibroid treatment for clinicians.

Dr. Borahay is a referral expert. He has received the Center of Excellence in Minimally Invasive Gynecology designation. Notably, Dr. Borahay received the Excellence in Clinical Teaching Award from the John P. McGovern Academy of Oslerian Medicine.

Dr. Borahay is the Principal Investigator of a multi-institutional NIH-funded study of uterine fibroid that includes a clinical trial. His research focuses on developing innovative fibroid treatments. 

Dr. Borahay has authored more than 50 scientific publications. His accomplishments have been recognized at national and international conferences through more than 100 presentations.

Dr. Feilim Mac Gabhann is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is also a core faculty member of the Institute for Computational Medicine. 

His research focuses on microvascular development and remodeling. Dr. Mac Gabhann serves as the director of the Hopkins Office for Undergraduate Research.

His team is currently engaged in projects that include inhibiting vascular endothelial growth factor signaling in cancer and promoting vascular endothelial growth factor signaling in ischemic disease.

Dr. Mac Gabhann received his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from University College Dublin. He earned his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Virginia before returning to Johns Hopkins to join the faculty.

His work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, the American Physiological Society Arthur C. Guyton Award for Excellence in Integrative Physiology and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.

Ie-Ming Shih is one of the world鈥檚 leading scientists and pathologists for women鈥檚 cancers. He has led and contributed to a new paradigm in the origin of ovarian cancer, which upends decade鈥檚 old view and posits that ovarian cancers arise from the oviduct rather than from the ovary.  This may explain why current strategies of early detection fail. Shih is leading collaborative research to understand the molecular landscape and evolutionary history of early ovarian cancer, use routine Pap smears to detect oviduct precancer lesions that travel down to the opening of the uterus and advocate to remove fallopian tubes in women for prevention, if there is a surgical opportunity.

Dr. Rajini Rao is a professor of physiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her area of research expertise is studying the roles of intracellular ion transport in health and disease. She serves as the director of the graduate program in cellular and molecular medicine and the director of the Center for Membrane Transport at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Dr. Rao received her undergraduate degree in chemistry and biology from Mount Carmel College in Bangalore, India. After receiving her Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Rochester in 1988, she spent five years as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Carolyn Slayman at Yale University. She arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1993.

One of her lab's many accomplishments is the discovery of an oncogenic role for SPCA2 in breast cancer, opening a new chapter in the study of this isoform. Currently, Dr. Rao's lab researches the roles of intracellular cation transport in human health and disease using yeast as a model organism.

Her academic activities are divided equally between education, mentoring and research. As the director of the graduate program in cellular and molecular medicine, she oversees a multi-departmental training program that includes approximately 130 faculty mentors and 150 graduate students. She is a faculty mentor in other graduate programs at the School of Medicine (biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology; cellular and molecular physiology) where she teaches, direct courses and holds small group discussions. She has mentored more than 20 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in her lab, many of whom have won national awards and independent fellowships.

As part of her long-standing effort to improve the representation of minority groups at all levels of academia, Dr. Rao has participated in numerous diversity committees and panels. She served on the admissions committee for the summer internship program at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, which offers research experience to students of diverse background.

The human body is teeming with internal fauna. There are an estimated 10鈥�100 trillion additional cells in this mass of microbes 鈥� roughly equal to the number of human cells in our bodies 鈥� and they are found everywhere, including the breast. Sharma will focus on one such microbe, Bacteroides fragilis, the presence of which in the breast, gut and mammary tissue is linked to a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer.

Scientist Andrew Ewald studies how cells work together, organize and form organs in early development. Cancer cells co-opt these mechanisms to break away from a tumor and form metastatic sites all over the body.