In Brief

JHU teams take top-three places in Mosh Pit biz competition
For the fourth year in a row — in fact, since
the competition began — a team from Johns Hopkins has
grabbed the brass ring in the Mosh Pit business plan
competition sponsored by the Greater Baltimore Technology
Council.
Students Dan Higginson and Jordan Swanson,
postdoctoral fellow Paul M. Kim and predoctoral fellow
Krisha Juluri — all from the School of Medicine
— pitched their plan for a Web-based marketplace for
plasmid exchange to a panel of judges who had to be
convinced to invest their imaginary dollars in the various
competitors' efforts. The team, which called itself
GeneTrade, won $15,000 and will receive free business
advisory and a year's worth of free office space to get
their venture going.
Second- and third-place finishers were also JHU teams.
Muro (Lai Hock Tay, Winnette McIntosh Ambrose and Lefei
Sun) came in second with its idea for a device to screen
for infectious diseases and biological threats using tears
rather than blood. Placing third was Smart Health (Frank
Zhu, Yu-Kuan Lin and Menghui Tsai) with a plan to build
micro-scale glucose sensors for use by diabetics. These
teams won $10,000 and $5,000, respectively.

Ronald Peterson inducted into Maryland Business Hall of
Fame
Ronald R. Peterson, president of The Johns Hopkins
Hospital and the Johns Hopkins Health System, and executive
vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine, has been inducted
into the Maryland Chamber of Commerce's Maryland Business
Hall of Fame.
Currently vice chairman of the Governor's Workforce
Investment Board, he is the past chairman of Baltimore's
Workforce Investment Board and a member of the board of the
Maryland Mentoring Partnership and the Central Maryland
United Way, and is a past member of the Maryland Chamber of
Commerce board. Peterson also serves as chairman of Johns
Hopkins Community Physicians and as a trustee of the Johns
Hopkins Home Care Group.

New nursing options to focus on emergency
preparedness
Two new graduate options now offered by the
School of Nursing
will prepare nurses for pivotal leadership roles during
disasters and mass casualty incidents. Health Systems
Management: Emergency Preparedness/Disaster Response
— a clinical nurse specialist track in the Master of
Science in Nursing program — and a post-master's
certificate option are designed for nurses seeking
strategic skills in planning, managing and responding to
large-scale emergencies or disasters.
The program was designed by Marguerite
Littleton-Kearney, an associate professor and a captain in
the Navy Nurse Corps (Reserve Component), in response to
her concerns following the 9/11 disasters. In the event of
mass casualty incidents, bioterrorism and natural
disasters, Littleton-Kearney said, nurses are uniquely
positioned to assume leadership roles in the education of
first responders and to coordinate hospital triage
planning, disaster drill design and implementation, and
patient management.
Students will graduate with the tools to embark on a
career path to assume leadership roles for emergency
preparedness in hospitals, nursing homes, ambulatory
centers, the military, government agencies and other
settings.

Golden Knights parachute team to land on Homewood
Field
The U.S. Army's Golden Knights parachute team will be
jumping the flags and game ball into the stadium on
Homewood Field on Saturday, May 7, when alumni gather for
Homecoming Weekend's lacrosse matchup against Loyola.
One of the premier parachute teams in the world, the
Golden Knights are being hosted by the
Military Science
and Athletic
departments. They are expected to make their jumps from
about 3,500 feet.

Bayview among nation's top performance improvement
leaders
Bayview Medical
Center was named last week as one of the nation's top
performance improvement leader hospitals by Solucient, a
leading provider of strategic business and clinical
information for the health care industry.
Bayview and its senior management team were recognized
for developing consistent and effective organizationwide
performance improvement across critical measures at a
faster rate than other U.S. hospitals between 1999 and
2003. These measures include quality of care, operational
efficiency and financial performance.
The findings appear in the April 25 edition of
Modern Healthcare magazine.

Researchers receive state funds to commercialize
technologies
Two Johns Hopkins researchers were announced last week
as recipients of funding from the Maryland Technology
Development Corp. to commercialize their inventions. The
awards were made through TEDCO's University Technology
Development Fund.
Scott Peacock of
APL received $60,000 to develop a handheld measurement
system to monitor the health of engines, such as
automobiles and small factory machines. Current vibrometers
or machine-mounted accelerometers are too expensive to be
practical for this application.
Saeed Khan, an assistant professor in the
School of Medicine, received $50,000 to design small
molecules to block a tumor cell protein that allows the
cell to evade the body's normal tumor cell suppression
mechanism. He will use the funding to evaluate the most
promising small molecules for the potential development of
new cancer drugs.
GO TO MAY 2,
2005
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