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Dear Johns Hopkins Community:  Summer has a well-earned reputation for being slow and quiet compared to the buzz of back-to-school in the fall. But not this summer. Not at Johns Hopkins. Indeed, the past three months have been humming with activity. So, as we begin another semester, I wanted to share some highlights of a truly historic summer and some of the major events we envisage for the start of our 148th academic...

Dear Johns Hopkins Community: Ten years ago, we joined together to develop the university’s first ever strategic framework, the Ten by Twenty. In spring 2022, we began a series of conversations across the institution around the creation of a new set of goals and aspirations for the university for the years to come. Today, I am excited to share with you a draft of our next university strategic vision: The Ten for One—ten...

Dear Johns Hopkins Community, Last night, for the first time in the history of our world, an extraordinary team of scientists and engineers from around the globe successfully demonstrated humankind’s capacity to alter the course of an extraplanetary object—in this case an asteroid named Dimorphous—7 million miles away. At the center of the DART (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission was The...

Dear Johns Hopkins Community: In January 2020, after a long hiatus from teaching, I decided to return to the classroom to teach an undergraduate Intersession course on the university and democracy. All the trepidation and anxieties I felt when I taught my first university class many years ago came rushing back. Would the flow work? Had I assigned the right texts? Would the students find the readings as compelling as...

Dear Colleagues: We are thrilled to share some exciting news at the close of this academic year: Johns Hopkins is launching a major expansion of our education-related benefits for our employees. We have heard from you that a better, more expansive education benefit would allow more of you to pursue undergraduate or graduate degrees while working at Johns Hopkins. We hope these expanded offerings will support you in...

Two years ago, we started down a path to revisit Johns Hopkins University’s Ten by Twenty strategic vision and to dream together the next phase of our bold future. Unfortunately, those strategic planning conversations were disrupted by the urgent demands of the COVID pandemic. Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are relaunching this important effort, and I hope you will participate. During our listening...

Dear Johns Hopkins community: Over the past week, we have all watched with considerable alarm as Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, precipitating a tragedy that has upended lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, and is destabilizing the international order. Yet as distressing as the invasion has been, so many of us have also been awed by the stories of courage and compassion that...