Building Human Bridges

Sitting in her office on a humid June afternoon in 2017, Aronson Assistant Professor Sarah Parkinson, A&S ’04, thinks back to where she sat the year before: on an airplane undertaking a precautionary “spiral landing” at Erbil International Airport in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).

“It’s to avoid missiles,” Parkinson says of the maneuver. Erbil is about an hour and a half east of Mosul, where, as the plane landed, an international effort to retake the city from Islamic State control would soon be under way. With support from the Aronson Professorship, Parkinson had traveled to KRI to embed with humanitarian groups serving those fleeing Mosul and other Islamic State-controlled territories.

“To understand politics, you have to interact with the people who experience the politics as they are, not as you assume them to be,” Parkinson says, describing her work in the Middle East and other conflict zones around the world. “The Aronson funding allowed me to get out into the field at a very important time, and I made connections that will elevate my research and teaching for years to come.”

That’s exactly what chair of the university’s Board of Trustees Jeff Aronson, A&S ’80, Parent ’13 and ’15, and his wife, Shari, intended when making a $10 million gift. The couple established the Aronson Center for International Studies to promote closer ties between the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Advanced International Studies, engage experts to solve problems in international relations, and provide opportunities for young people to learn from these leaders.

“If you sit in the field for two years in Palestinian refugee camps, you learn a lot about migration, but most donors and granting agencies won’t fund you to do that kind of work,” she says, “Excellence, creativity, and innovation are driven by people who have worked their entire careers to develop an eye for what is important to study. They need to not be placed in boxes of ‘Is this useful to the government right now?’ but instead free to consider ‘Is this valuable as knowledge to humanity?’”

“We — Hopkins, and all American colleges and universities — need to attract the kind of faculty and support projects that may take a long time, and may not use the buzzwords of the moment, but allow us to determine important truths.”

The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies has received more than $50 million, the largest combined gift in the school’s history, to launch its new Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs.

The center will specialize in long-term strategic analysis and in the disciplined application of historical lessons to contemporary international problems. It will also serve as a focal point for scholarship and public debate on international affairs and policy.

The center is named after former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who said at a launch event Thursday that it opens at a crucial time in international relations.

“We are living in a period in which we are conscious of our divisions, but it serves to inspire us to our duties because the world is now as disordered as it has ever been,” Kissinger said. “It is the first time in history that upheavals occur in every part of the world simultaneously and are connected with each other by rapid communication and by global economics.

“I am excited at the prospect of this center located in Washington, D.C., and drawing people from around the world to synthesize thought and political theories in developing leaders and strategies capable of dealing with contemporary global challenges.”

Distinguished scholars, leaders, and special guests attended the center’s launch celebration. The event that featured a panel discussion on “Geostrategy and Challenges Facing U.S. Foreign Policy” at the Willard in Washington, D.C.

“The creation of The Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs could not be happening at a more important moment in our history,” said Ronald J. Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University. “The center will teach the practice of statecraft for the 21st century and will be profoundly relevant to political leaders for years to come.”

Added SAIS Dean Vali Nasr: “The Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs will bring top academics, diplomats, and statesmen together to discuss and develop stronger foreign policy strategies with an emphasis on geostrategy and an appreciation for history.”

To take on enormous challenges — and indeed to understand and solve complex problems — Johns Hopkins must find faculty members and develop students who are capable of in-depth specialization yet prepared to work across disciplines that have traditionally been regarded as separate.

Such transformational thinking underlies the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships, 50 unique faculty positions created through a landmark gift alumnus, philanthropist, and three-term New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Engr ’64.

The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships help deepen the university’s capacity for interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing new leaders and their ideas to our campuses, and training new collaborative scholars from first-year students to post-docs.

Bloomberg Distinguished Professors work with hundreds of undergraduate students, exposing these future leaders to new modes of thinking and discovery while building intellectual bridges, breaking down academic silos, and serving as a model for the future of academia at Johns Hopkins and around the world.

“I think the Malone Center is the perfect sort of playground for those two worlds to come together and sort of change human-based medicine,” says Malone Professor John Krakauer, MA, MD, of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare.

Krakauer and Jeremy Brown, PhD, the John C. Malone Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and a fellow member of the center, are bringing together medicine and engineering to create the innovative new treatment. The collaboration combines animation and haptics, or a person’s sense of touch.

“Hemiparesis means paralysis down one half of your body, and it really is a mixture of loss of strength and loss of dexterity and control,” explains Krakauer. “So that’s where the dolphin came from. Maybe if you could sort of swim in the ocean as a dolphin and make all those big required arm movements, we could make patients better.”

The collaboration has also sparked the development of a hand device that can be used at a patient’s bedside.

“This hand device will have really sensitive force sensors on it that can actually measure these small micro movements, amplify them, and provide encouragement to these patients,” Brown says. “Improving someone’s life.”

Former Under Secretary of State Sarah Sewall, now the Speyer Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, is exploring the challenges of artificial intelligence and its implementation in the modern world.

“Artificial intelligence offers all kinds of potential for human gain. But there’s a dark side to it,” Sewall explains. “It was very evident in the Chinese social control of the Muslim Uighur population in Xinjiang that technology was going to be used in ways that were really, not just constraining, but eroding of human rights and of human freedoms.”

It’s a really exciting, and somewhat terrifying, but important set of questions to begin grappling with,” she continues. “How do we think about democracy when technology is essentially taking power from individuals and aggregating them into data sets? These are huge questions with enormous ramifications for the next generation in our country and in the globe.”