David B. Hellmann,
MD, MACP
One of the many wonderful gifts I received from my dad was his fascination with words — and the more complex the word, the better. Into this category falls “agathokakological.” A mouthful by any measure, it beautifully combines Greek roots to describe something that is simultaneously good (agathos) and bad or evil (kakos).
As I survey the unprecedented challenges at play today in health care, and the heroic way that CIM donors and faculty members are stepping up to meet them, it strikes me that “agathokakological” is an ideal descriptor. Or, to put a more literary spin on it, I could borrow from Dickens’ opening line to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
In response to recent catastrophic cuts to federal research funding for talented clinician-scientists, CIM’s donors have met kakos with agathos by generously funding the Next Generation Scholars program. As you’ll read, the program will support the work of 11 early career clinician-scientists at Johns Hopkins with up to $300,000 in funding over three years. It’s impossible to overstate the impact this timely funding will have in ensuring that life-saving advances in human health don’t wither on the vine.
Among the pressing health challenges we face today is Alzheimer’s disease. You’ll be encouraged to know that pathologist Meaghan O’Malley Morris, the Anne and C. Michael Armstrong CIM Human Aging Project (HAP) Scholar, is stepping up with creative approaches in the lab aimed at stopping Alzheimer’s early in its tracks, before it wreaks kakos.
Alzheimer’s disease isn’t the only threat to our rapidly aging population. Fortunately, with the opening of the Human Aging Project’s new translational research hub, Johns Hopkins engineers and clinicians are collaborating to enable older Americans to experience “the best of times” — healthy, independent living, for as long as possible. The launch of Geriatrics Engineering@Johns Hopkins, truly a source of agathos, is tempered by our great sadness at the recent passing of HAP’s founding director Jeremy Walston. While we all miss Jeremy terribly, the Human Aging Project stands as a proud tribute to his vision.
There are other reasons for optimism in the face of current trying circumstances, like the way CIM’s Center for Humanizing Medicine is multiplying improvements in patient care across Johns Hopkins through CHM’s impact grants, and the legacy that CIM’s Amos Food, Body and Mind Center has had in bringing relief — and defining a new syndrome — to hundreds of patients afflicted by physical and psychological distress.
I am so grateful to the many friends of CIM, and faculty members, whose unflagging commitment to agathos are enabling advances in patient care to continue during these tumultuous times.
David B. Hellmann, M.D., M.A.C.P.
Aliki Perroti Professor of Medicine
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
Posted In:
David B. Hellmann,
MD, MACP
One of the many wonderful gifts I received from my dad was his fascination with words — and the more complex the word, the better. Into this category falls “agathokakological.” A mouthful by any measure, it beautifully combines Greek roots to describe something that is simultaneously good (agathos) and bad or evil (kakos).
As I survey the unprecedented challenges at play today in health care, and the heroic way that CIM donors and faculty members are stepping up to meet them, it strikes me that “agathokakological” is an ideal descriptor. Or, to put a more literary spin on it, I could borrow from Dickens’ opening line to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
In response to recent catastrophic cuts to federal research funding for talented clinician-scientists, CIM’s donors have met kakos with agathos by generously funding the Next Generation Scholars program. As you’ll read, the program will support the work of 11 early career clinician-scientists at Johns Hopkins with up to $300,000 in funding over three years. It’s impossible to overstate the impact this timely funding will have in ensuring that life-saving advances in human health don’t wither on the vine.
Among the pressing health challenges we face today is Alzheimer’s disease. You’ll be encouraged to know that pathologist Meaghan O’Malley Morris, the Anne and C. Michael Armstrong CIM Human Aging Project (HAP) Scholar, is stepping up with creative approaches in the lab aimed at stopping Alzheimer’s early in its tracks, before it wreaks kakos.
Alzheimer’s disease isn’t the only threat to our rapidly aging population. Fortunately, with the opening of the Human Aging Project’s new translational research hub, Johns Hopkins engineers and clinicians are collaborating to enable older Americans to experience “the best of times” — healthy, independent living, for as long as possible. The launch of Geriatrics Engineering@Johns Hopkins, truly a source of agathos, is tempered by our great sadness at the recent passing of HAP’s founding director Jeremy Walston. While we all miss Jeremy terribly, the Human Aging Project stands as a proud tribute to his vision.
There are other reasons for optimism in the face of current trying circumstances, like the way CIM’s Center for Humanizing Medicine is multiplying improvements in patient care across Johns Hopkins through CHM’s impact grants, and the legacy that CIM’s Amos Food, Body and Mind Center has had in bringing relief — and defining a new syndrome — to hundreds of patients afflicted by physical and psychological distress.
I am so grateful to the many friends of CIM, and faculty members, whose unflagging commitment to agathos are enabling advances in patient care to continue during these tumultuous times.
David B. Hellmann, M.D., M.A.C.P.
Aliki Perroti Professor of Medicine
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
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In her scientific quest to improve treatments for people living with HIV, Johns Hopkins’ Eileen Scully has long held a strong commitment to both research and patient care. The holder of an M.D./Ph.D. from Yale, who trained at MIT and Harvard, Scully has since 2016 split her time between caring for patients in Hopkins’ Bartlett Clinic and building her translational research program. That work focuses on the impact of sex on immune responses to viral infections such as HIV.
“Earlier this year, I felt the momentum really shift for me,” Scully recalls. “I had secured a good amount of federal research funding and after what had felt like years of an uphill slog, I thought: ‘Wow, now I have the fuel to really advance these promising areas of inquiry.’”
But in March, the bottom dropped out after two large federal grants that supported her work were terminated. The affected projects examine how sex-specific hormone exposures may impact the HIV reservoir, the primary barrier to a cure for HIV. At the same time, additional funding for a planned project on HIV dynamics during pregnancy and menopause in women in Uganda was delayed by new federal restrictions. It’s work that could potentially lead to improved treatment in infectious diseases for both men and women everywhere.
“The funding disruption was a total earthquake in my own career, coupled with the much bigger cessation of USAID for health projects around the world, which felt so much bigger,” says Scully.
Then in June came some good news: Scully was among 11 promising clinician-scientists at Johns Hopkins to receive a CIM Next Generation Scholar Award. The awards are made possible thanks to funding from generous CIM donors, including Sarah Miller Coulson, who is funding Scully’s work.
“They are bright lights in their fields, who have the potential to make real advances.” – Nadia Hansel
The Next Generation Scholars program was created to support outstanding early-career faculty who are innovators in the areas of research, education and clinical care. The selection process is very rigorous. CIM is accepting applications three times per year. Applicants must explain how the work they are proposing will fortify medicine as a public trust, and identify a senior faculty member who will mentor their work. Each CIM Next Generation Scholar is eligible to receive up to $300,000 of funding over three years. From the 24 applicants who submitted proposals last spring, 11 recipients — hand-picked by leaders in specialties across the school of medicine — were selected.
“They are bright lights in their fields, who have the potential to make real advances,” says Nadia Hansel, director of the Department of Medicine. “We need to invest in our best and our brightest now more than ever,” she adds, citing the recent cuts and interruptions in federal research funding, as well as increasing financial pressures on health care and academic medicine.
“It’s hard for me to overstate the importance of this award and its timing,” says Scully. “It’s been incredible, really allowing me to hone in on the questions where we will have the most impact.”
In creating the Next Generation Scholars program, leaders were very intentional in targeting the support to clinician-researchers who are early in their careers. “This is where funding can make the biggest influence, where an early investment can give young faculty the boost they need to launch their careers,” says Hansel.
That is certainly the case for Leslie Miller & Richard Worley CIM Next Generation Scholar Bipasha Mukherjee-Clavin, an assistant professor of neurology whose research focuses on the progressive neurodegenerative condition known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease.
“There is a lot of momentum-building during this early career stage,” she says. “If one good thing happens — one small grant or one new source of support — that success feeds on itself and starts to open more doors. It’s an outsized impact.”
“There is a lot of momentum-building during this early career stage. If one good thing happens — one small grant or one new source of support — that success feeds on itself and starts to open more doors.” – Bipasha Mukherjee-Clavin
Despite its unusual name, Charcot-Marie-Tooth is a “remarkably common” form of peripheral neuropathy that is thought to affect about 1 in 2,500 people in the United States, Mukherjee-Clavin says. In her early research, she was on a team that created one of the first stem cell models of the disease. More recently she has moved into using animal models to better understand the biology behind the most common form of CMT.
“There are 130 different genes identified with CMT but about half of people have CMT1A, which involves a duplication of the PMT22 gene,” she explains. The funding will also advance her investigations into studying whether therapeutic interventions are best targeted early, or later, in the progression of CMT. These are questions with important implications for the millions of people worldwide who suffer from this debilitating condition.
“This is an important population to help because at present there are no disease-modifying treatments for this disease,” Mukherjee-Clavin says. “We treat the symptoms, through the use of leg braces and tools to help with opening jars, for example, but these are imperfect strategies since being able to walk and use your hands is so important to functioning in this world.”
The funding that comes with her Next Generation Scholar award “came at a very, very important time for my career development,” she says.
Looking across the broad variety of specialties touched by the Next Generation Scholars funding, Nadia Hansel says she has renewed excitement for the future and the potential for truly game-changing advances in research, education and patient care.
“There is a very beautiful alignment between CIM and the Department of Medicine because our core values — that medicine is a public trust — are well entwined.” – Nadia Hansel
“There is a very beautiful alignment between CIM and the Department of Medicine because our core values — that medicine is a public trust — are well entwined,” says Hansel. “By partnering together through the Next Generation Scholars program we can double down on our shared mission. I’m very excited about the partnership!”
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
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In a large lab space known as the “motion capture room,” a Johns Hopkins Ph.D. engineering student is quite literally putting an older woman through her paces. Sixteen cameras are set up in pairs throughout the room, tracking the woman’s gait in real time as she walks across the room, and then moves through a series of exercises on a treadmill. The data collected is aimed at detecting factors — such as misaligned hips or hunched shoulders — that could impair the woman’s balance and put her at risk for a fall.
It’s Official!
The ribbon-cutting for the new Geriatrics Engineering @Johns Hopkins translational research hub took place on November 19, with many Johns Hopkins leaders — including Whiting School of Engineering Dean Ed Schlesinger and School of Medicine Dean/CEO Theodore DeWeese — in attendance.
Meanwhile, down the hallway, a Hopkins neurologist and an engineering professor lead a man in his 70s through a series of reading and writing exercises on a digitized notepad. An array of sensors tracks the movement of the man’s eyes, the cadence of his voice and the movement of his hand. The researchers will continue to assess the man’s reading and handwriting every few months. Their overarching goal: to detect neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s in their earliest — and most treatable — stages.
These two projects are just a few of many efforts that are unfolding — some now, others in the months and years to come — in a new hub for healthy aging research, which opened in July at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Campus under the umbrella of the CIM-supported Johns Hopkins Human Aging Project (HAP).
The 10,000-square-foot center, believed to be the first of its kind in the country, is bringing together faculty and students from engineering and medicine — as well as nursing, public health, and business — with older adults and their caregivers to test technology-driven solutions to some of the biggest challenges older adults face.
These include social isolation, mobility issues, and neurodegenerative decline, notes Najim Dehak, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering and co-director of the new hub. “Our aim,” he says, “is to leverage technology to extend the time that older adults can remain living safely and independently at home.” Dehak has even coined a term for this new area of translational research, which is reflected in the hub’s name: Geriatrics Engineering @Johns Hopkins.
“Our aim is to leverage technology to extend the time that older adults can remain living safely and independently at home.” – Najim Dehak
“The partnership between clinicians and engineers and other interdisciplinary scientists all coming together is transformative,” says geriatrician Cynthia Boyd, a Lavinia Currier CIM Scholar and director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, who has stepped in to shepherd the Human Aging Project after the passing of the HAP’s founding director, Jeremy Walston, a HAP Salisbury Family Scholar (see “In Memoriam”).
With its plentiful conference rooms, labs, and offices, as well as a model apartment that simulates a realistic living space of an older adult, the hub notably provides a new home for the Johns Hopkins Artificial Intelligence & Technology Collaboratory for Aging Research (AITC). Established in 2021 with $20 million in funding from the National Institute on Aging, the AITC currently has 129 pilot projects up and running. Developed by research teams at Johns Hopkins and universities and tech incubators around the country, some AITC projects have spawned prototypes that are already in market testing.
The goal with AITC projects and other research efforts unfolding in the new facility is to move innovations as quickly as possible into affordable solutions that seniors of all income levels can easily use, says geriatrician Peter Abadir, who co-directs the new facility. He notes that faculty and graduate students from Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School are actively engaged on many projects to ensure that products can be marketed successfully and made widely available and affordable.
“We aren’t just building gadgets. We’re creating scalable solutions to meet older adults where they are — in their homes, or senior centers, or their doctor’s office,” says Abadir, Salisbury Family Foundation CIM/HAP Scholar. “We’re bringing engineers from the Homewood campus together with clinicians in East Baltimore to work shoulder by shoulder, quite literally, to design and validate technology that will help older adults live independently for longer, and with dignity.”
“We aren’t just building gadgets. We’re creating scalable solutions to meet older adults where they are — in their homes, or senior centers, or their doctor’s office.” – Peter Abadir
A focal point of Geriatrics Engineering @Johns Hopkins is the model apartment, which includes a living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. While planners were still in the process of furnishing the living space in early fall, they are intent on creating a look and feel that is both comfortable and familiar for older adults and their caregivers — clutter and all.
“So much technology currently on the market is developed by testing it on young people, then reverse-engineered for older adults, and it’s developed in a sterile, studio-like setting,” says Abadir. “Here we are starting with older adults and determining their needs to make sure the technology we develop is relevant to them, in the places where they live.”
Dehak, a 2021 Whiting School of Engineering/HAP Scholar, concurs. “It’s so important for older adults to be included in the design of any new ‘smart home.’ They need to be a part of the conversation.” Toward that end, in the months ahead, both older adults and their caregivers will visit the model apartment to try out and provide feedback on the wearable trackers, robotic assistants and voice-activated systems that will be tested there.
Boyd notes that the Bayview campus is already the site of many well-established geriatrics-focused clinical programs and research centers, which will afford easy access to, and collaboration with, clinicians and their older patients and caregivers — thanks, in large part, to the ground-building work of Jeremy Walston.
“Jeremy took the lead in building a registry of older adults in the community who were interested in participating in studies aimed at healthy aging, many recruited through the Beacham Center for Geriatric Medicine,” she says.
She continues, “There is a long history at Bayview of aging research and geriatric clinical care — of working to support older adults living in our community — that is deep and profound and goes back decades. This hub is an exciting next step in partnership with Johns Hopkins clinicians, engineers and community members that will allow us to continue to advance the science and enable older adults to age as healthfully as possible.”
Ed Schlesinger, dean of the Whiting School of Engineering, has been an early and ongoing champion of the collaborative space. He says, “There is really no university today that is better equipped to lead in this area than Johns Hopkins. If anyone can do this, we can.”
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
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It’s impossible to overstate the pain, frustration and despair that hundreds of patients faced before finding their way to CIM’s Amos Food, Body and Mind Center at Johns Hopkins, says psychiatrist Glenn Treisman, center co-founder.
“These were patients with significant gastrointestinal problems, who also were dealing with a host of other issues like migraines, chronic fatigue, depression and even hypermobile joints,” says Treisman. “Most had been very sick for years and had bounced from doctor to doctor, who couldn’t find anything wrong and told them their problems were ‘all in their head.’”
Fortunately, these patients finally found answers, and healing, when they made their way to the Amos Center, which was established in 2014 thanks to a generous gift from Courtney and Paul S. Amos. The center, which was co-created and co-led by Treisman and gastroenterologist Pankaj “Jay” Pasricha is considered to be the first clinic in the world that brought together gastrointestinal and psychiatric experts to treat patients in both physical and psychological distress.
The Amos Center truly shifted the paradigm by taking a multidisciplinary approach to diagnosis and treatment. Where before patients with these complex symptoms would have endured an endless stream of appointments with different specialists — cardiologists, rheumatologists, gastroenterologists, nutritionists, pain medicine doctors, psychiatrists — the experience was dramatically different at the Amos Center. There, patients would meet together with a team of Johns Hopkins experts from varied clinical areas.
“We would all sit in the room together, sometimes even arguing about what we thought the problem might be, right in front of the patient. Our disagreements were no secret,” Treisman says. “Ultimately, over the course of an hour, we would come to consensus on the best path forward — and the patient would know why. Some would break down weeping, saying, ‘This is the first time anyone has ever listened to me.’”
“Some patients would break down weeping, saying, ‘This is the first time anyone has ever listened to me.’” – Glenn Treisman
Ultimately, as a result of this unconventional approach, Pasricha and Treisman would identify an entirely new syndrome, which defined about 75% of the 600 or so patients they saw at the Amos Center. Known as JAG-A, it is thought to be rooted in an underlying autoimmune disorder and involves a combination of four conditions:
By describing the JAG-A syndrome and the criteria that define it, Pasricha and Treisman have opened new pathways for treatment — at the Amos Center and among specialists around the country, who previously had been mystified by the unusual constellation of symptoms.
Through papers and presentations on JAG-A, they’ve shed light on new culprits in some people with disabling GI disorders: autoimmune disorders and/or dysautonomia (problems affecting the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary bodily functions like heart rate, digestion and blood pressure).
“We now have objective tests that we can perform, which we didn’t have 20 years ago, that can help make a JAG-A diagnosis,” Treisman says. “These tests include whole gut transit imaging, where we can trace a piece of food that is eaten, such as a sandwich, and identify where there are delays in digestive function. In patients presenting with chronic pain, a skin biopsy can be used to identify small fiber neuropathy, “a sign that the autoimmune system is attacking the nerves,” he says. Patients also undergo testing for abnormal immune function.
As a psychiatrist, Treisman has been able to bring a vital perspective to diagnosing and helping to treat patients with JAG-A and related disorders, who often have associated problems with their mental health.
“People have talked about the gut-brain connection for a long time, but usually in the context of people who are depressed or anxious and, as a result, have physical symptoms. But that’s not the whole story,” says Treisman. “We are emphasizing that this is bidirectional. Signals emanating in the gut can influence how the mind feels.”
While Pasricha left Johns Hopkins in 2022 to become chair of medicine at Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, Arizona, the impact that the Amos Food, Body and Mind Center had in its eight years of existence continues to be felt at Johns Hopkins and beyond.
“We have broken new ground, and as both of us and our colleagues continue to see new patients who come in with a devastating array of symptoms, we are now able to get a lot of people better — people who would never have gotten better before,” Treisman says. “It’s remarkable.”
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
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