The affirming words on the wall are painted in bright colors and embellished with rainbows, sunbursts and stars: “Believe in Yourself!” “Smart, Strong, Fearless!” and “Anything is Possible.” Amid the inspiring exhortations hang two large bulletin boards, filled with polaroid snapshots of smiling young Johns Hopkins patients. All have scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Some stand proudly, modeling their back braces. In one shot, a grinning girl poses in a field goal stance, as if about to kick her brace. The photo was taken after her final visit.
“We often see children and parents lingering over the photographs with smiles on their faces, and when we ask if they want their picture added to the board, the children are eager and excited,” says Kristen Venuti, a nurse practitioner who worked with physician assistants Karen Wille and Alison Dyszel to create and install the boards at three outpatient pediatric orthopedic locations.
The trio’s project is just one of two dozen made possible last year by the CIM’s Center for Humanizing Medicine (CHM) through its impact grant program. The idea behind the grants, totaling up to $1,500 each, is that small ideas can have an outsized effect on patients’ lives, says Martha Abshire Saylor, the Mary Ousley CIM Scholar and the first CIM nurse scholar, who is leading the impact grant effort.
Based on survey feedback from recipients of the first round of CHM impact grants, many participants are finding ways to make their piloted efforts sustainable, says Abshire Saylor. Buoyed by that success, she and her team put out a call for proposals and funded a new round of promising proposals this fall.
“Once again, the project ideas we received from interdisciplinary teams across Johns Hopkins, all aimed at improving the patient experience in creative ways, were absolutely inspiring,” says Abshire Saylor, who is stewarding the effort together with Scott Wright, director of the Miller Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence and holder of The Anne Gaines and G. Thomas Miller Professorship, and Mary Catherine Beach, co-leader of the Center for Humanizing Medicine. Both Wright and Beach are Mary Gallo CIM Scholars.
“Once again, the project ideas we received from interdisciplinary teams across Johns Hopkins, all aimed at improving the patient experience in creative ways, were absolutely inspiring.” – Martha Abshire Saylor
The dozen projects funded for 2025–2026 will touch patients and families from The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to Howard County General Hospital in Columbia, Maryland, to All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida.
They include an initiative with the apt acronym HUSSH (for Healing Using Soothing Sounds in the Hospital) that will bring white noise machines to the comprehensive transplant unit to give adult patients a more restful environment for recovery, as well as a monthly “caregiver café” that will offer monthly dinners for patients (and their families) undergoing long hospitalizations for cellular therapy. And in the neurocritical care unit, an initiative spearheaded by music therapist Kerry Devlin will create legacy keepsake kits for families whose loved ones die while in care.
The impact grants were inspired by the earlier success of CIM’s “pyramid grants” program, launched in 2011, which Cynthia Rand — the Mary Gallo CIM Scholar (2022) and an active member of the Center for Humanizing Medicine — oversaw at Bayview.
Abshire Saylor says that the outpouring of proposals that have come in from all corners of the Johns Hopkins Health System is evidence that staff and clinicians of all stripes — nurses, doctors, technicians, social workers, unit staff — are eager to embrace and further the work of CIM’s Center for Humanizing Medicine.
“The Center is focused on transforming the patient experience by promoting empathy, trust, and dignity, and ensuring each patient is known as a person rather than just a case,” she says. “These projects really are the cornerstone of that mission.”
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
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By any measure, Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative condition with a massive impact. Currently more than 7 million Americans over 65 are living with this progressive, memory-robbing illness, which brings steady decline and heartbreak for those living with the disease and the millions of family members and friends who care for them.
To get a better handle on how this outsized disease begins in the brain, Johns Hopkins pathologist Meaghan O’Malley Morris is looking small, very small — to a 2-millimeter-wide region buried deep in the brain stem known as the locus coeruleus (LC). Specifically, her team is zeroing in on the very earliest formation of abnormal Tau protein in the LC, and then tracing how those abnormal Tau proteins accumulate and spread to other regions in the brain. Tau protein is an important target, since it is known to clump and produce tangles that are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, notes Morris, who is the Anne and C. Michael Armstrong CIM Human Aging Project (HAP) Scholar.
“Thanks to funding I have received as a HAP Scholar, our lab has been able to take a step into more advanced protein studies, known as spatial proteomics, to look at which proteins in which cell types are associated with the early formation and the spread of Tau,” says Morris, who earned her M.D./Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and also completed her residency and fellowship training here.
To get a better picture of how the disease “gets off the ground,” Morris and her team are examining the post-mortem brain tissue of people ages 16–65, a period in the human age span before symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease would typically appear.
In addition to studying the formation and spread of abnormal Tau protein and associated inflammatory cells in the LC, the researchers are also examining the presence of Amyloid beta protein — which is known to accumulate into clumps or plaques in people with Alzheimer’s — to see how the two proteins interact.
“It’s very important for us to figure out what is going on very early in the disease, because by the time people start showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s, there is already a decent amount of Tau and Amyloid that has accumulated,” says Morris.
“It’s very important for us to figure out what is going on very early in the disease, because by the time people start showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s, there is already a decent amount of Tau and Amyloid that has accumulated.” – Meaghan O’Malley Morris
Until recently, traditional proteomic techniques have not been fine-grained enough to offer a useful window into the ultra-tiny locus coeruleus, which is barely the size of a toothpick tip. But thanks to advances in spatial proteomics, which reveals which proteins are active where, Morris and her team can now get down to a 20-micron level, basically the size of a single cell, in their investigations.
They are finding the presence of abnormal Tau protein in nearly all of the brain tissue they examine, even those of younger people under 40.
What causes Tau cells in some people to leave the LC and travel from deep in the brain stem up into regions like the cortex, where they grow into tangles and wreak havoc? How might inflammatory cells surrounding Tau in the LC contribute to Tau’s early formation and growth?
These are among the big questions that Morris and her team are working to shed light on as they tap into the latest advances in proteomics, data science and biostatistics. The answers they find could hold tantalizing clues for stopping Alzheimer’s disease early in its tracks, before it is able to take hold and cause destruction in our brains.
“The funding I have received as the Anne & C. Michael Armstrong CIM HAP Scholar has been crucial to advancing our work,” says Morris. “We are so excited about what lies ahead.”
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
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Whether it’s the candid experiences shared by a survivor of sarcoidosis, the insights of a Nobel Prize winner in medicine, or the ethical framework that guides a Johns Hopkins transplant oncologist, one key theme has come through in all of this fall’s CIM Seminars: the importance of medicine as a public trust.
“At CIM and across the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, this concept must be a north star for all of us,” says pulmonologist Michelle Sharp, a Mary and David Gallo CIM Scholar and Elena and Everardo Goyanes CIM Scholar, who is the organizer of the 2025–2026 CIM Seminars. “My goal in the speakers we’ve selected is to explore how we can learn from medicine’s history and really look to the change that’s coming in health care to ensure that medicine remains a public trust.”
This principle, as articulated by public health expert Steven Schroeder in his seminal 1989 paper, is both timeless and incredibly timely, given the current landscape in medicine. Crucially, it calls for shared responsibility: “Medicine is entrusted by society to improve the health of the public through education, patient care and research. In return, medicine receives significant public funding, respect and autonomy.”
Toward that end, Sharp has been intentional in bringing a wide variety of voices and perspectives to this year’s CIM Seminars, which unfold about twice a month over Zoom for an avid audience of patients, CIM donors, and current and former Johns Hopkins faculty members, sometimes totaling as many as 100 or 200 people.
While a number of speakers are esteemed leaders in medicine (such as the 2019 Medicine Nobel Prize-winner and former Johns Hopkins Osler Medical resident William G. Kaelin Jr., who spoke about the power of curiosity-driven research, or Hopkins’ William B. Greenough, who pioneered oral rehydration therapy to treat cholera) other speakers this fall are public figures who have made a name in TV, the movies, and music.
For example, Ted Koppel, renowned TV anchor and winner of 52 Emmys, discussed what we can learn from broadcast journalists about building public trust in accurate communication, and celebrated actor Alan Alda, now 89, will talk about the importance of empathy in fostering human connection. For that seminar in January, Sharp will travel to Manhattan with physician Karl VanDevender to conduct a live interview with Alda, who hosted PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers documentary TV series for 12 years. Alda continues to host the popular podcast Clear + Vivid, which focuses on the art of connecting and communicating.
Sharp notes that skills such as empathy and strong communication are absolutely critical to providing humanistic health care, “which is central to the mission of why so many of us went into medicine in the first place.” She underscored the importance of the patient experience herself with the very first seminar of the year, on September 16. In that presentation, Sharp hosted Tishia Humes, a patient in the sarcoidosis clinic at Johns Hopkins, which Sharp leads. “Our patients need to be at the center of everything we do, so it was very important to me that we start off with a patient’s perspective,” she says.
Because sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease that can affect almost any organ, and there is currently no known cure, living with the devastating condition is particularly challenging, as Humes shared for the CIM audience.
Given the value such insights hold for those working in the medical community, Sharp is looking to grow the audience for the CIM Seminars, to include medical students and trainees, in the months ahead.
“Right now, many would agree that our medical system is facing many significant challenges,” she says. “As a generation of clinicians and scientists, we need to be thinking innovatively about how everyone can have access to the public trust that medicine should be. I am hoping the CIM Seminars can be a catalyst for the field.”
Don Willett November 8th, 2025
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