TO: Reporters and editors covering the economy
FROM: Amy Lunday / 443-287-9960 / [email protected]
RE: 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks: Johns Hopkins University Sources Available
Reporters may want to consider some of the following Johns Hopkins University scholars as potential sources for stories about how the world has changed 10 years after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bioterrorism and biodefenseResearchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are at the forefront of efforts to detect and prevent the use of biological weapons and are an excellent source of information on anthrax, smallpox and other threats to public health and safety. One of those experts is medical physicist Jonathan M. Links, a professor and the deputy chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Links directs the Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center, funded by the Centers for Disease Control, focusing on disaster mental health and public health systems research, and the Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center, another CDC-funded cooperative agreement focusing on public health preparedness curricula development, training, and professional practice. He is also deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response, which is responsible for all disaster planning for both the university and health system. He holds joint professorial appointments in radiology and emergency medicine in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and a secondary appointment as professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Education.
"War on Terror," National Security, Homeland Security, Terrorism, Islamic Religious Extremism, Jihadism, al Qaeda, Middle East, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, South Asia, Pakistan, American Foreign Policy, International Energy Security, International Law, United Nations, Weapons of Mass DestructionFor leading experts in the above fields and many others, consider the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.
International Security and Terrorism; and the impact of Sept. 11 on young adultsSteven R. David, a professor of political science, has spent his career studying issues of international security, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. He has served as a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense, and has closely followed the United States anti-terrorism and defense efforts since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon 10 years ago. As a longtime professor and vice dean for undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins, David has worked closely with undergraduates since the early 1980s, teaching courses dealing with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. As a result, David can discuss the changing student reactions he's witnessed in his courses and how the world view of today's college students compares to that of their parents.
The financial sector in a post-Sept. 11 worldTwo faculty members at The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School are available to discuss how the terrorist attacks affected America's financial sector. Lindsay J. Thompson, an associate professor, can discuss 9/11 in relation to business and leadership ethics, business and society, women and gender issues, religion and spirituality at work, and livable cities and sustainable development. Phillip H. Phan, interim dean and professor, can comment on the financial and economic impact of 9/11 on industry, with particular reference to the airline and travel industries. Phan can also comment on the impact of 9/11 on immigration and the unintended consequences on the competitiveness of the United States.
Computer speech recognition and the war on terrorSanjeev Khudanpur, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, can discuss how the Sept. 11 attacks led to a new sense of urgency in training computers to recognize human speech and identify terrorism threats in several languages, including Arabic, Korean and Chinese. Khudanpur is a researcher in the Whiting School’s Center for Language and Speech Processing. Founded in 1994, the CLSP was one of the first research efforts nationwide to focus on computer recognition of human-to-human speech. Its work is supported by the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation, among others.
Civility in America in the wake of Sept. 11P.M. Forni, director of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins, observed that in the days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks, people across the nation turned to each other for comfort and were suddenly more kind and courteous. They showed more discipline and restraint while driving, seemed more tolerant of each other's mistakes, and would smile at a stranger on the street. With the passage of time, it seems like Americans have returned to their old ways, from discourteous daily contact among coworkers to the vitriolic political debates in Washington. As the author of both Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct and its follow-up, The Civility Solution, Forni has spent the past 10 years studying the changing face of civility and offering guidance for responding to rude behavior. His new book The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction (Tuesday, Sept. 13, St. Martin's Press), addresses how our increased connectedness through the Internet, social networks and smart phones can actually diminish the quality of our contact with one another and can divert us from the kind of introspection that is necessary for our emotional health.
Religion after Sept. 11William Egginton, author of the new book In Defense of Religious Moderation (June 2011, Columbia University Press), can discuss the increase in fundamentalist tendencies and decreases in moderate thinking since Sept. 11, 2001. Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins.
###Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://releases.jhu.edu/Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.
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