Dr. Brown has for the last 11 years directed a philanthropic- and National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) funded program, the Johns Hopkins Internship in Brain Science Program: Project Pipeline Baltimore, that provides experiential research training in HIV-associated neuropsychiatric disorders and neuroscience topics to high school students. She co-directs another NIMH-funded program to increase workforce diversity in the area of HIV neuroscience and mental health that targets trainees at the graduate to early career levels. She also serves as co-director of the Developmental Core for the NIMH Johns Hopkins Center for Novel Therapeutics for HIV-Associated Cognitive Disorders, mentoring since its inception over 30 young investigators and early career faculty to secure pilot grant funding and apply for larger grants.
Dr. Brown has mentored over 157 high school junior and seniors, and with 10 of the 21 undergraduates, has published cited journal articles with them. Among the undergraduates from URM backgrounds that she has mentored several have received advanced degrees at Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institutes of Technology (MIT), University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and the University of Kentucky. These trainees have continued their training to become postdoctoral researchers and physicians.
Through the didactic web-based program, Translational Research in NeuroAIDS and Mental Health, she has helped bring training to 380 graduate-level to early career faculty. At the institutional level, she has for the last four years, served on the school wide Diversity Leadership Council, and thorough efforts on the Faculty Development and Recruitment Subcommittee helped formulate recommendations to university leadership and played a key role in the roll out of the Roadmap, a living institution wide plan to increase excellence in diversity and inclusion at all levels of the university. Since 2015, she has led the JHUSOM clinical neuroscience department’s engagement and outreach efforts with community in Baltimore City.
Dr. Brown was selected as a Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cell Biology Fellow for 2014, the AAMC Mid-Career Minority Faculty Leadership Seminar and for her work in helping to diversify the training pipeline, in 2014 she received the Johns Hopkins Diversity Leadership Award. More recently she was nominated for the Provost Prize for Faculty Excellence in Diversity, nominated for the Inaugural NINDS Story Landis Mentoring Award and in 2018, received the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Living the Hopkins Mission Honor.
LINKS:
JHIBS: PROJECT PIPELINE BALTIMORE
TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH IN NEUROAIDS AND MENTAL HEALTH
Dr. Ratnanather is Associate Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering. He is affiliated with the Center for Imaging Science and Institute for Computational Medicine. He has been applying computational neuroanatomy methods, specifically segmentation, cortical morphometry including thickness, diffeomorphic registration and shape analysis in a wide variety of diseases: schizophrenia, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, Epilepsy, Depression, Deafness, cardiovascular, Parkinson’s, Autism and ADHD. In 2012, his group’s application of diffeomorphic whole body mapping was recognized with the Farrington Daniels Award by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine for the best paper in radiation dosimetry in Medical Physics.
Dr. Ratnanather was the first person with profound congenital hearing loss in the world to get a DPhil (PhD) in Mathematics (at Oxford) and to do postdoctoral research in auditory neuroscience (at JHU). In 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) in recognition of his work in recruiting and mentoring an unprecedented number of individuals with hearing loss in the United States and abroad into STEM fields. In addition to mentees now in residency or fellowship programs in radiology (Wisconsin), pathology (University of North Carolina, Emory School of Medicine) and internal medicine (Johns Hopkins), one mentee became the first person with hearing loss to get a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at JHU and now is Associate Professor of Otolaryngology at Oregon Health and Science University where another peer mentee is also Professor, and another mentee is Clinical Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at Rhode Island Hospital.
In 2015, Dr. Ratnanather received an award for outstanding leadership in the field of spoken and listening language by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (AGBell). More recently, in 2017 he received honorable mention for the Provost’s Prize for Faculty Excellence in Diversity. He wishes to help a growing and untapped pool of high school and college students with hearing loss who are benefiting from advances in cochlear implants and hearing aids and wish to pay back to society by working in STEM and medicine.
Heather Thomas, MBA has worked for the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine since 2014, and served as Program Manager for the JHNSP program from 2019 to 2023, providing guidance and administrative support to the students and faculty who are part of this program. In addition to her work with our program, she also supported several programs in the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins also funded by the NIH to include: The NIMH Center for Novel Therapeutics for HIV-associated Cognitive Disorders; the Intranasal Insulin Study for Neurocognitive Disorders; and the online course called Translational Research in NeuroHIV and Mental Health.
She also served as the Administrator for Neurology’s Internal Grant Review Program (IGRP), which helped several new and early stage investigators obtain NIH grant funding. Through these roles, Heather’s passion is to help students and new investigators develop their skills in the health sciences through education and hands-on training by organizing science conferences, retreats, courses in grantsmanship and professional development, and lab experiences. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Heather worked as a Neurosurgery Residency Program Coordinator, was a Clinical Research Assistant for multiple brain and spinal cord injury studies, and also served active duty as a Combat Medic in the United States Army at the rank of Sergeant. Heather graduated with a Masters of Business Administration (M.B.A.) from University of Maryland University College and a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Health Systems Management from the University of Baltimore. She currently serves as the Program Director for the OneNeuro Initiative, and is pursuing her Doctorate (Ed.D.) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education.
George Hseeh served as the JHNSP Program Manager from 2018 to 2019, and has previously collaborated with Dr. Amanda Brown with the Johns Hopkins Internship in Brain Science Program: Project Pipeline Baltimore. He received his Bachelors of Arts (B.A) in Behavioral Biology and minor in Entrepreneurship and Management from Johns Hopkins University. During his undergraduate years, he served as a Research Assistant in the Brown lab, studying the effects of osteopontin on HIV-induced neurons.
In addition, he worked as a chemistry Teaching Assistant, a Resident Advisor, and a basketball coach for local middle school students. George is invested in giving back to his communities and will be awarded a joint Masters of Business Administration (M.B.A.) and Medical Doctorate (M.D.) from Rutgers University in Spring 2024.