Signature Initiatives

The 21st Century Cities (21CC) Initiative at Johns Hopkins is a university-wide Signature Initiative that brings together civic leaders, top Johns Hopkins researchers, students, and other universities worldwide with a vital interest in cities. Their goal is to catalyze the potential and confront the pressing needs of cities in the 21st Century, like Baltimore, that have had to address sharp demographic and economic changes. 21CC is, at heart, a knowledge-creation enterprise that sparks and nurtures a different kind of knowledge creation – one that is both deeply cross-disciplinary and vitally engaged with cities and their civic leadership. The initiative builds on and supports Baltimore’s legacy of resilience and transformation. It embraces a broad cohort of sister cities from the U.S. and across the globe that face or have faced similar opportunities and challenges. It brings the most talented urban scholars in the nation together with civic leaders from Baltimore and elsewhere to identify and test promising approaches to urban challenges. Cross-disciplinary research, engagement with Baltimore and other revitalizing metropolitan areas, and on-the-ground initiatives to improve the well-being and life chances of all citizens of the 21st Century City are hallmarks of this initiative.

Bloomberg Distinguished Professors: Matthew Kahn, Faculty Director of 21CC and Stephen Morgan

The Johns Hopkins Individualized Health Initiative (Hopkins inHealth) seeks to promote and encourage innovative collaborations to make world-class, affordable health care a reality for the 21st century. With collaborations across the University, Hospital and Health System, and Applied Physics Laboratory, Hopkins inHealth is improving individual and population health outcomes through scientific advances at the interface of biomedical and data science. Physicians, scientists, engineers, and information experts are helping doctors customize medical decision-making for each patient by connecting and analyzing huge databases containing information from electronic health records, DNA sequences, RNA expression levels, protein structures, and high-tech images. Through these efforts, Hopkins inHealth seeks to usher in a new era of medical practice where disease prevention, detection, and treatment plans are tailored to every individual’s unique circumstances.

Bloomberg Distinguished Professors: Rexford Ahima, Arturo Casadevall, Nilanjan Chatterjee, Christopher Chute, Andrew Feinberg, Carol Greider, Taekjip Ha, Rong Li, Steven Salzberg, Kathleen Sutcliffe, and Alexander Szalay

The Science of Learning Institute (SLI) seeks to connect more than 500 scholars from the cognitive and brain sciences, education, engineering, medicine, arts, and other disciplines to create an integrated understanding of learning, focusing on a range of content domains including language, memory, attention, spatial understanding, and decision- making. For example, SLI is investigating how learning varies as a function of basic learner characteristics, how these characteristics interact with different environments and learning settings to produce variation in learning outcomes, and how interactions with intelligent artificial learning systems can enhance and optimize human learning. The institute has funded more than a dozen cross-disciplinary research endeavors to better understand how learning occurs in humans, animals, and machines, and is using those findings to provide insights into how learning can be optimized for all individuals across the lifespan and across different kinds of talent.

Bloomberg Distinguished Professors: Patricia Janak and Alan Yuille