Getting in the swing
Homewood campus is all but deserted on this cold Thursday night, save for a few well-wrapped souls who are making their way into Levering. Once inside, familiar faces greet one another and mingle, while the rest file directly into the Great Hall.
   Just before 5 p.m. a rather sizable crowd has gathered, 80 in all, and the large room fills with talk and the shuffling of feet resonating upon the wood floor. The majority of the group are students, eager to get started with the night's activity. A woman with a headset gets their attention.
   "All right, let's get started," says the woman, who is dressed in narrow white pants and a big pink sweater. "Girls over here, and boys over there." The group obliges, and, reminiscent of a high school mixer, the two sexes face each other from opposite sides of the room. Now it's time to do what they came here for: dance.
   The woman with the headset is Joanne Houlahan, a full-time faculty member in the School of Engineering's Computer Science Department, who for the past six years has been teaching a swing dance class during intersession. Typically the class has averaged about 40 to 50 students, but this year Houlahan certainly has her hands full because right now swing (in case you slept through 1998) is the latest craze. Full story...

New science program to break barriers
Chemists, biologists, computer scientists and engineers usually work independently, pursuing their own research projects with their own tools and methods. But a $2.5 million grant will allow the university to train some of tomorrow's scientists and engineers in a new way, by breaking through some of the boundaries that traditionally divide these scientific disciplines.
   The grant, to be provided over five years by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, will help establish the Johns Hopkins Program in Computational Biology. The program will have a special emphasis on cutting-edge genomics research, in which scientists sequence DNA from cells and viruses and then use that information to solve the far more difficult questions of how cells assemble the larger molecules and complex structures that make them work. Full story...

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