Retirement TV, MPT airing Brody health care conversations

A series of conversations in which Johns Hopkins President William R. Brody discusses the country's present and future health care system with some of the nation's leading political and public leaders has begun airing through a collaboration between Retirement Living TV and Maryland Public Television.

Healthcare '08: Search for Solutions features Brody's dialogues with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP; John Erickson, CEO of Erickson Retirement Communities; Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House; and Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health. During the series, Brody interviews the participants, and journalists including Judy Woodruff, Lea Thompson and Felicia Taylor act as moderators.

"This is a rare opportunity for the MPT and RLTV audiences to share in a dialogue between thought leaders on what is undoubtedly one of the most important issues facing our country," said Elliot Jacobson, VP of programming and production at RLTV. "This series presents an insight into both how our health care system really works and what needs to be done to fix it. Dr. Brody does an exceptional job at challenging conventional wisdom in these interviews."

The shows are on RLTV at 3:30 p.m. Thursdays and on MPT at 8 p.m. on Fridays. Upcoming episodes are May 8/9, Erickson; May 15/16, Novelli; May 22/23, Gingrich; and June 19/20, Zerhouni. The Bloomberg episode aired last week.

 

BME teams take top spots in MoshPit business competition

The Johns Hopkins BME winning streak at the MoshPit! business plan competition is unabated. Out of 104 plans submitted this year by college students from all over Maryland, teams from Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering swept the top three prizes. The contest, established by the Greater Baltimore Technology Council in 2002, is open to all full- and part-time students in Maryland colleges and universities. A Johns Hopkins team has taken the top prize every year. In 2007, a JHU team also finished second.

This year's first prize of $10,000 went to SurgyTech for an innovative bowel-packing device to simplify abdominal laparotomies. Team members were Gayathree Murugappan, Joshua Liu, Mike Bisogno, Kevin Yeh, Vicki Zhou and Brian Liu.

The second-place winner, awarded $7,500, was Synthex Technologies' plan for a research robot for gel extraction. The team was made up of co-founders Judy Qiu and Matt Rubashkin, and Daniel Merzel. Radiogenic Therapeutics took third place with MultiMark, a novel, minimally invasive way for implanting high-visibility markers into tumors to allow precise targeting of external beam radiation therapy. The team of Juinting Chiang, Brian His, Ian Lee and Linmiao Xu was awarded $5,000.

Top-placing SurgyTech also came up the winner in the 2008 Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition, produced by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington-Baltimore in collaboration with the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. More than 50 teams from 15 area universities submitted plans for the competition, with six advancing to the final round.

 

Hopkins-Nanjing's Pollard Building wins AIA award

The Samuel Pollard Building at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies has received a merit award from the American Institute of Architects' Committee on Architecture for Education.

The 11-story building, designed by Perkins + Will, opened in fall 2006, adding 100,000 square feet of new classroom, library, office, meeting and residential space to the campus, as well as a new auditorium and conference center.

 

WSE announces winners of its student video competition

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time — a video about an overburdened engineering student who invents a telekinetic ring to help with physical chores like vacuuming — took top honors in the Whiting School's recent video competition. It was created in the Digital Media Center's Intersession course by Noel Sanjuan and Robert Huynh.

The second-place winner, Self-Assembling Nanoliter Containers, by Dave Filipiak, Mustapha Jamal and Tim Leong, also received the People's Choice Award. Tied for third prize were Swamp, by Chris Blizzard, Ross Burns and Makibi Takagi; and Hands On, by Alexander Mo, Cindy Fei and Justin Lee.

The winners will receive cash prizes, and the videos will promote Hopkins Engineering online via JHU Web sites and YouTube. To view all the entries, go to: engineering.jhu.edu/videocompetition08/ finalresults.html.

 

Ohio Sen. Brown gives 'A View from Capitol Hill' at SAIS

SAIS will hold a forum titled A View From Capitol Hill at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, May 7. Hosted by the SAIS Center on Politics and Foreign Relations, the Financial Times and the Johns Hopkins Center for the Study of American Government, the forum will feature Sherrod Brown, Democratic senator from Ohio; Chrystia Freeland, U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times; and Robert Guttman, CPFR director. Brown, an uncommitted superdelegate, will discuss the presidential race the morning after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries.

The session will be held in the Nitze Building's Kenney Auditorium. Non-SAIS affiliates should RSVP to CPFR at cpfr@jhu.edu or 202-587-3237.

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