Xiao Le, A&S ’13 (far left), and Ah Young Shin (far right), a graduate student at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, went hiking with Joanne Dorrett, wife of Paul Dorrett, A&S ’69, and the young student she mentors in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. Their outing was supported by the Alumni Association’s new initiative to connect alumni and students in the Baltimore area. TASTE, short for “Take a Student to Events,” matches alumni and students for one-time shared experiences, which this fall have included hikes, dinners out, and ballgames. Find out more at alumni.jhu.edu/taste.

Eighteen Johns Hopkins travelers spent two weeks this fall touring China, with stops for special events with local Alumni Association clubs featuring prominent alumni speakers. In Beijing, after touring Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and China’s Great Wall, travelers joined local club president Boyong Wang, SAIS Bol ’01, SAIS DC ’02, and other alumni to hear Zhu Min, A&S ’91 (MA), ’96 (PhD), a recently appointed vice governor of the People’s Bank of China, speak about the interconnectedness of the global financial system.

It is the story of the perception-defying Troop 759, a group of four city kids and their two troop leaders, as they head off to summer camp.

Rajesh Panjabi has told the story of his 1990 escape from Liberia countless times, but it hasn’t made it any less powerful.

Walking down the hall at work one day, Pamela Paulk, vice president of human resources for the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System, ran into her colleague Robert Imes. Imes, a painter/mechanic in Facilities at Johns Hopkins and a photographer for Johns Hopkins events, is also a union delegate. He and Paulk knew each other from years of working on union issues. Imes had just returned from a 10-month sick leave for kidney disease, and on this, his first day back, Paulk asked if there was anything she could do. “Well, I could use a kidney,” Imes joked. Then Paulk did something shocking: She offered him one of her own.

Recent graduate and organ virtuoso Felix Hell has the ability to be one of the leading organists of his generation according to Peabody’s Donald Sutherland.

Rachel Breman is the program technical adviser for Infante Sano, a nonprofit that works with mothers and infants in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ben Krause grew up in Nebraska and intended to become a Jesuit priest. But after years of social work in the United States and Latin America, he realized his true calling was to empower people in developing nations to create their own solutions. After leaving the Jesuits, he joined the Uganda Village Project, which links small local organizations with international resources to improve the lives of rural villagers. “It’s about working with communities to help them identify their needs and obstacles,” he says, “and the practical steps we can take to solve them together.”

On a path that has taken him from Baltimore to the Bronx to London to Afghanistan to Washington, D.C. (and, now, Wall Street), Wes Moore has learned how to see—and seize—the opportunities before him. A Baltimorean who moved to New York City as a young child, he was a restless teen who bristled against authority. A change of scenery and vision (read: military school) was what it took to start him moving forward. “[Military school] was the first place I actually dared to think bigger,” he says today. After graduating with an associate degree and a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, Moore returned to Baltimore to complete his undergraduate work at Johns Hopkins, with student aid scholarships, and turned his vision upward. “Hopkins was where that vision got a dose of clarity. I knew if I could compete there, I could compete anywhere. I knew I could make a contribution.”

1945 Charles Edwards, A&S ’45, ’48 (MA), ’53 (PhD), who retired in 1991, now divides his time between Sarasota, Florida, and New York City and assists in science teaching in a Sarasota elementary school. 1952 George Manos, Peab ’52, has written a book, The President’s Pianist: My Term with Truman and My Life in Music, […]