Three from Hopkins BME earn Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award

Thirty-five promising early-career faculty members from across the nine academic divisions of Johns Hopkins University have been selected to receive Johns Hopkins Catalyst Awards for 2024, a prestigious recognition reflecting their accomplishments to date, creativity and originality, and academic impact. Among the award winners this year are Joshua Doloff, Jude Phillip, and Jeremias Sulam, all three are assistant professors of biomedical engineering.

Doloff’s research focuses on exploring the intersection between living systems and biologic or synthetic therapeutics to better understand what happens when deliverables are introduced into the body and how the host immune system responds.

Phillip is applying fundamental engineering principles to answer key questions in aging and cancer biology, and aims to translate discoveries from his lab into the medical arena to improve human health and longevity. Specifically, his lab is developing robust cell-based biomarkers of aging in health and disease, as well as establishing research pipelines that explain the mechanistic relationships between age-related disorders, disease progression, and treatment responses.

Sulam’s research focuses on sparse recovery, dictionary learning, and machine learning, with emphasis on inverse problems in general signal and biomedical image processing. His lab studies deep learning, its application to detection, classification, and other problems in biomedical sciences, as well as devising methods for the safe and responsible use of these tools.

“From its inception, our university has nurtured early-career faculty whose novel investigations and groundbreaking ideas have changed our understanding of the world,” JHU President Ron Daniels said. “With this year’s Catalyst Awards, we are thrilled to support another 35 remarkable early-stage faculty from disciplines that span the full breadth of our university as they pursue new research and bold discovery that makes a meaningful and lasting impact on society.”

Each honoree will each receive a $75,000 grant to support their work over the next year. They also will have the opportunity to participate in mentoring sessions and events designed to connect them with colleagues at similar stages in their careers.

The Catalyst Awards program was launched in early 2015, as was the Discovery Awards program for interdivisional collaborations. Together the two programs represent a $45 million university commitment to faculty-led research by university leadership along with the deans and directors of JHU’s divisions.

The Catalyst Awards program is open to any full-time faculty member appointed to a tenure-track position within the past three to 10 years. Faculty from across the university served on the committee that selected the awardees from this year’s pool of 106 submissions.

This is the ninth year of the program, which has now recognized a total of 316 high-potential faculty from all divisions of the institution.

“The future of Hopkins is bright,” says Denis Wirtz, JHU’s vice provost for research. “Catalyst Awards support extraordinary early-career faculty at Hopkins, and this year, once more, I was blown away by the originality of the projects proposed by faculty from all divisions of the university. Every project proposal is a testament to our scholars’ ambition and passion for innovation in their fields.”

Learn more about all the Catalyst Award winners on the Hub.