Meet the Awardees

African diasporic life and politics represents a crucial new area of study in the Krieger School. While hiring in this area has been robust, and a new director for the Center for Africana Studies (CAS), has just been hired, this Center must continue to grow: a cluster of new faculty, each from different departments, across divisions, would bring together scholars whose expertise in Africa, the U.S., Caribbean, and Europe broaden our general understanding of black intellectual life, social movements, and politics generally. Such a cluster hire will also help to ensure that faculty at JHU make black culture a national site of scholarly inquiry into race, democracy, and freedom.

Cluster Leads | Minkah Makalani & Vesla Weaver

Fluid mechanics is at the heart of critical global challenges from the spread of virus containing microscopic droplets to the atmospheric and oceanic flows governing climate patterns and the production of wind and wave energy. A fluid mechanics thematic cluster will thus enhance an area of current strength for the university that is set to have major impacts on global health, climate, materials, energy and space exploration. These areas are well aligned with the strategic plans of the university and bolster existing multi-school centers, (e.g. CEAFM and ROSEI). These problems span traditional departmental boundaries and therefore the cluster will focus on researchers that bridge subfields and bolster ties across departments and schools.

Cluster Leads | Gretar Tryggvason & Dennice Gayme

Mathematical Biology is a field in which models of complex biological systems are built in order to understand and predict the behavior of these systems. Moreover, designing these models directly from the rules that govern biological systems further enables inquiry into the fundamental mechanisms and timing in the prediction of future states of biological systems. This discipline uniquely enables computational predictions to design the next experiment, therapeutic, or biomarker. Enabling these biological advances requires further theoretical and methodological advances in mathematics. Modeling techniques include differential equations, partial differential equations, signaling networks. Mathematical Biology is inherently an interdisciplinary pursuit. The excellence of Johns Hopkins investigators in mathematics, biology, medicine, and computational biology provides a rich environment in which Mathematical Biology can thrive. At Johns Hopkins, practitioners are housed in various departments – Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Biomedical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Biophysics, Neuroscience, etc. We believe the Fannie Gaston-Johansson Faculty of Excellence Program can have a profound impact in diversifying faculty who work at this intersection of life sciences and mathematics.

Cluster Leads | Warren Grayson & Elana Fertig