Michael Klag brings a "vision for global leadership" to
the Bloomberg School.
Photo by
Will Kirk |
"I feel enormously privileged to lead an institution so
critically important to the world's health. If you're
interested in public health, there's no better institution
than the Bloomberg School," says Klag. "It is humbling to
follow in the footsteps of the people who have been deans
of this school."
Klag, 52, is the David M. Levine Professor of Medicine in
the
School of Medicine, with joint appointments in the
Bloomberg School's
Department of Epidemiology and
Department of Health Policy and Management. He also is
vice dean for clinical investigation in the School of
Medicine. In that position, created in 2001, he is
responsible for oversight of research that involves human
volunteers. He has undertaken a widely praised
restructuring of the School of Medicine's policies and
procedures governing human subjects research.
"Mike Klag is a rare individual," says Edward D. Miller,
CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine and dean of the School of
Medicine. "I have been privileged as dean to have available
to me his talents, his dedication, his insights, his
integrity, and his intellect. I have counted on Mike for
wisdom and straightforward advice, always delivered with
deft good humor."
Klag, who begins as dean on September 1, earned his MPH in
1987 from what was then the School of Hygiene and Public
Health. That same year, he joined the Hopkins faculty as an
instructor of medicine and director of the clinical track
of Public Health's preventive medicine residency
program.
He was one of the first epidemiologists to start to unravel
the risk factors for kidney disease, as well as its
prevalence and effective intervention strategies for it.
He also has focused on the role of ethnicity in disease,
searching, for instance, for explanations of the different
risks among different groups for developing high blood
pressure.
Klag's "command of national and global issues of public
health, his passionate commitment to public health
education, and his collaborative spirit make him ideally
suited to build on the extraordinary work of his
predecessors, Al Sommer and D.A. Henderson," says
university president William R.
Brody, who recommended to the executive committee of
the Hopkins board of trustees that Klag be appointed. "He
will outline a vision for global leadership in public
health and ensure that the school's faculty and students
have the resources needed to execute that vision."
— Catherine Pierre
Sports: Undefeated Jays head to NCAA
And now for a perfect post-season.
|
Conservation scientist Jennifer Giaccai carbon-dated the
crucifix in question.
Photo by John
Dean |
"We about had a stroke," remembers Vantine's classmate,
Nancy Murray Cook.
It turned out to be a lucky break-literally.
With it, Vantine, Cook, and fellow classmate Jessika Wrabel
got a rare glimpse inside a work of art, which
helped them study the piece's age. Ultimately, the
three-part-time master's degree students with day jobs at
Hopkins and very little background in art history —
helped determine that the crucifix was a fake.
"It's a classic [example] of art history," says Vikan,
director of the Walters and a longtime teacher in the MLA
Program. "They got it. They found the pieces to the
puzzle."
Vikan had been suspicious about the crucifix since he first
saw it, soon after he arrived at the Walters in 1985. "It
just didn't look right," he remembers. "It had Romanesque
and Gothic characteristics in the same piece. I sort of
suspected it didn't have a home in the Middle Ages."
Still, a museum medievalist had purchased the 15-inch-tall
carving of Christ, believing it to be authentic,
originating from France between 1150 and 1170. The smooth,
worn-looking figure — head and body, its arms missing
— is quite detailed, with decorative crown and
loincloth.
"It's not a stupid fake," says Vikan. "It's a very
beguiling figure."
Vikan took the crucifix off display but kept it in the
collection. Last spring, he offered the piece as an object
worthy of study in his MLA class.
(After the accident in class with the crucifix, Vikan
inspected it and said it looked as if the foot had been
broken and repaired before. It was then the students dubbed
it "One Foot Jesus.")
Analyzing its appearance, size, composition, style, and
use, the group found discrepancies that fueled doubt about
the piece's authenticity. The broken foot showed worm holes
(actually insect-bored holes that look like worm tunnels),
which, along with the wearing of the oak, indicated
significant age. But the design of the loincloth —
with a flap in the front instead of a knot — wasn't
consistent with other 12th-century crucifixes.
|
Passion, politics, and good food |
Since the center's founding in 1955, more than 5,500
students from 100 countries have studied there. The alumni
roster is something of a Who's Who in international
relations, including a former deputy head of the Central
Intelligence Agency, a vice president of the World Bank,
more than 60 ambassadors, and at least 300 high-ranking
foreign ministry officials around the world.
Each year, about 180 students attend the Bologna program to
learn European and other area studies, international
economics, politics, history, and foreign languages from
professors who come from all over Europe and from the
United States. Most Americans earn a master's degree after
one year in Italy and a second year at SAIS in Washington.
Though historically most non-American students received a
BC certificate after their year at the center, most now are
heading to D.C. to finish their master's.
Many of the students consider their experience there
foundational. "There's hardly a day that goes by where I
don't draw upon something I learned at Johns Hopkins, even
if it's just my own musing about something I read in the
newspaper," says Richard Greco, BC '95, assistant secretary
of the Navy.
It's not just the academics. For many, it's being away from
home, living with students from as many as 30 countries,
and exchanging ideas with people from vastly different
backgrounds.
David Manning, BC '72, the British ambassador to the United
States, recalls being in class with Vietnam veterans. "I
remember thinking how extraordinarily they had been marked
by this," he says, "how much more mature they were as a
result of it, what a different world they had come from,
rather than the heady mix of Oxford academic life."
"The Bologna Center was an experiment in 1955 that proved
to be a grand success," says center director Marisa Lino.
"For the next 50 years, I hope to consolidate the center's
legacy for future generations." Lino says that the center
will broaden its programming, host international
conferences, and support faculty research. "It is an
important contribution that the Bologna Center can make to
the fields of international affairs and international
economics," she says.
— CP
Students: Making wildest dreams come true in South
Africa
In March of last year, Saul Garlick stood in a grade school
in the Mpumulanga region of South Africa. His parents are
South African and he still has family there, but his
interest on this day was the classroom before him. It was
gray: gray cement walls, gray cement floor, gray cement
cinderblocks for seats. Garlick recalls asking a teacher
what her wildest dream would be for her classroom. "She
looked at me and said, 'Anything? I can have anything I
want?' I said, 'Yeah. Anything.' She said, 'Furniture.' And
I said, 'We'll get that for you.'"
|
Junior Saul Garlick won a prestigious Truman Scholarship
for his work in public service. He is founder of the
Student Movement for Real Change and The Hopkins
Donkey.
Photo by
Christopher
Myers |
Garlick, who has just completed the third year of a
five-year BA/MA program in international relations at Johns
Hopkins, was not making an idle promise. An organization
that he founded with friends, the Student Movement for
International Relief (SMIR), has raised $15,000 for
assistance to South African schools.
"The first time I visited," says Garlick, "I saw three
classrooms for hundreds of students. They were forced to
learn outside. In South Africa, it's either blisteringly
hot or rainy much of the time, which means a lot of the
time they can't learn at all. That's when I decided that
more classrooms needed to be built."
A recent winner of a prestigious Truman Scholarship
(awarded to extraordinary juniors committed to careers in
public service), Garlick began creating service
organizations in high school. "I was sitting with a bunch
of friends toward the end of my junior year, having one of
those clichéd Starbucks kind of conversations," he
says. "We were talking about how nothing was energizing our
generation. We decided we wanted to work on education."
They founded the Student Movement for Real Change (SMRC),
which remains SMIR's parent organization. SMRC seeks to
provide nonpartisan aid to the developing world and
persuade students to take more active roles in improving
social conditions.
As president of SMIR, Garlick has overseen its expansion at
four institutions, including Hopkins. He hopes to establish
chapters on three more campuses. "Success is there, but
it's limited," he says. "We should be raising much more
than $15,000. That only builds half a school in South
Africa."
Organizing disparate people fascinates Garlick, and makes
him more interested in politics than hands-on foreign
development work. "I developed an interest in government
after a high school class that most people slept through-I
think even I slept through it a few times," he says. "But
something about it struck a chord with me." In 2002,
Garlick founded The Hopkins Donkey, a monthly
liberal political newspaper published by student
Democrats.
Garlick will apply his scholarship to graduate study at
Hopkins' Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies, concentrating on
U.S. foreign policy toward Africa.
— DK
APL: On Never Doing the Same Thing
Twice
"In change there's opportunity. It is a challenging time.
If everything were going along and we were doing for the
next three decades the stuff we've been doing for the last
three decades, frankly, I don't believe I would want the
job. . . . To say that it would be without trouble is naive
in the extreme, but as I've often said, most of my own
personal career has been built on doing one new thing after
another and in solving problems. I've never done the same
thing twice. . . . But I do enjoy the challenge of a new
problem, and that's why I am looking forward to this. And
if there weren't problems, they wouldn't need me."
— Michael Griffin, A&S '71, Engr '83 (MS),
speaking at an April 18 press conference about why this is
a promising time to be taking the lead role at NASA.
Griffin stepped down from his position as the head of the
Space Department at Johns Hopkins'
Applied Physics
Laboratory to become NASA administrator.
Return to June 2005 Table
of Contents
|