10 Johns Hopkins associates identified for exceptional network carrier
Recipients of the 2023 Nation Provider Award and 2024 Levi Watkins Jr. Beliefs Award will probably be venerated at Johns Hopkins’ annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration on Jan. 12
9 college, workforce participants, and scholars from Johns Hopkins College and Drugs had been decided on to obtain the 2023 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Nation Provider, a distinct honor spotting the ones whose loyalty to others embodies King’s legacy of carrier and equality. Whether or not they spend their presen helping refugees, increasing get admission to to high quality science schooling, or advocating for the ones with disabilities, this yr’s award recipients have long past above and past to toughen the lives in their neighbors.
Moreover, Erica Martin Richards, an colleague teacher on the Johns Hopkins Faculty of Drugs and Sibley Memorial Health facility’s chair and clinical director for the Section of Psychiatry and Behavioral Fitness, just lately gained the 2024 Levi Watkins Jr. Beliefs Award. Named in honor of Levi Watkins , Johns Hopkins Drugs’s first Lightless prominent resident and entire teacher, this award is given once a year to a pacesetter at Johns Hopkins Health facility who has made an impressive contribution to the establishment.
All 10 award recipients will probably be venerated right through Johns Hopkins’ forty second annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration , which will probably be hung on Friday, Jan. 12, within the Chevy Chase Auditorium in East Baltimore. The development will come with a keynote accent from former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison , and can be livestreamed.
Be told extra about this yr’s awardees:
2023 Nation Provider Award Recipients
Maxwell Duah
Postdoctoral Analysis Fellow at Johns Hopkins All Youngsters’s Health facility
Nation carrier has all the time been part of Maxwell Duah’s presen. In his local Ghana, he labored with native fitness assist practitioners to bring fitness screenings and academic fabrics about most cancers to underserved populations. Upcoming receiving a scholarship to earn his doctorate in hematology in China, he devoted weekends there to offering meals, clothes, and modest provides to orphanage properties and rural communities.
Now a postdoctoral fellow on the Most cancers and Blood Problems Institute at Johns Hopkins All Youngsters’s Health facility , Duah volunteers on Saturdays at Sure Have an effect on International, a company that addresses adolescence starvation in St. Petersburg, Florida. Month there, Duah is helping manufacture and distribute applications of meals. Next, then volunteering from 9 a.m. to two p.m., he and his spouse power across the discipline to bring leftover food and drink to people experiencing homelessness.
“To me, the most profound way to manifest the love of God is through community service,” stated Duah. “I exemplify this by serving people. … We all possess the capacity to overcome challenges with the support of a caring community.”
Marcelina Kubica
Clinical pupil on the Johns Hopkins Faculty of Drugs
3rd-year clinical pupil Marcelina Kubica has been volunteering a number of hours in step with hour with the Johns Hopkins-based Refugee Fitness Partnership since November 2021. She lately is the buyer outreach pupil govern on the program’s HEAL Refugee Fitness and Asylum Collaborative , which is founded on the Esperanza Middle in Baltimore’s Fell’s Level community.
Kubica plays digital paintings for purchasers on the border and conducts forensic clinical critiques in-person for the ones displaced from their house nations. She additionally raises cash thru grants and bake gross sales, supplies Spanish-language interpretation on the sanatorium, and serves as a fitness navigator for Asylee Ladies Endeavor. Because the daughter of Polish immigrants, she understands that hour this paintings may also be tricky, unhappy, and irritating, it may also be vastly rewarding.
Sanjay Kubsad
Trainee on the Johns Hopkins Faculty of Drugs
One among Sanjay Kubsad’s using targets is to put together high quality schooling extra obtainable. Out of doors of his paintings as a study fellow in orthopedic surgical treatment on the Johns Hopkins Howard County Clinical Middle , Kubsad is a lecturer on the Younger Scientist Magazine, a global student-run, peer-reviewed e-newsletter. All over highschool, he used to be senior scribbler and next head of outreach, piloting an idea known as Hubs to assistance scholars anyplace on the earth manufacture research-oriented science golf equipment.
“We’d provide all the materials and resources for the kids to run activities, and we’d connect them to local community members who could come in for talks and mentorship,” Kubsad defined.
Kubsad’s loyalty to schooling equality has additionally prolonged to more youthful inexperienced persons. From 2017 to 2019, hour incomes a bachelor’s stage in neuroscience on the College of Washington, he served at Jumpstart, an AmeriCorps initiative, as a corps member and group chief in underserved Seattle-area preschools together with the Refugee Ladies’s Alliance and El Centro de los angeles Raza.
Shelly LaPrince
Director of Healthcare Economics at Johns Hopkins Fitness Plans
Rising up, Shelly LaPrince watched her father assistance family of their network hour balancing full-time paintings, a folk, and army carrier. His instance lit a hearth in LaPrince that continues to burn shining. Over the occasion twenty years, LaPrince’s paintings has incorporated mentoring younger ladies, adopting households from native faculties for the vacations, taking part in studying systems for inner-city adolescence, and packing foods for aged households.
Those network carrier efforts grew to become to advocacy when she confronted a private problem hour seeking to conceive a kid, navigating the fitness assist device within the procedure. On account of her revel in, she used to be impressed to help and backup others additionally coping with infertility. LaPrince may be lately making her mark on world advocacy as she fulfills some other want: making sure Jewish ladies of African descent are viewable and heard in shield areas.
“The level of fulfillment I received from helping others provided the motivation to continue giving back,” she stated.
Nicole Pannullo
Clinical pupil on the Johns Hopkins Faculty of Drugs
Nicole Pannullo, a doctoral candidate in cell and molecular drugs, started volunteering with Equivalent Get entry to in Science and Drugs in a while then its inauguration in 2019 and continues to govern the crowd’s advocacy for college students with disabilities, continual sicknesses, and psychological fitness statuses.
Pannullo, who grew up on Lengthy Island, Unutilized York, used to be born with average listening to loss and has old listening to aids since preschool. In 8th grade, she used to be recognized with Usher syndrome kind II, a genetic situation characterised by means of listening to loss at delivery and motivated lack of peripheral and night time optical founding in early life. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, she used to be impressed to push for accessibility measures at Johns Hopkins, together with recorded lectures and closed captioning. She is now serving to to assemble a community that can tie trainees with alumni mentors who’ve related disabilities and occupation pursuits.
“We shouldn’t feel like we have to hide our disabilities,” Pannullo stated. “People with disabilities should be celebrated as an underrepresented group that can bring different experiences to the table.”
James Peng
Intern on the Johns Hopkins Howard County Clinical Middle, Scholar at Glenelg Top Faculty
James Peng’s advance from China to Howard County at past 11 fueled his interest for the clinical farmland, in particular round oncology study. All over his wave internship on the Johns Hopkins Howard County Clinical Middle, Peng has helped the ongoing schooling group as they paintings to start up and enforce initiatives to foster nursing schooling. As an example, he has created informative clinical brochures that train sufferers in regards to the possible advantages of immunotherapy remedies and has labored on instructional movies about peritoneal dialysis and atmosphere mattress alarms for sufferers in danger for falls.
Past his internship, Peng holds vital positions in numerous carrier organizations, together with his function because the lieutenant governor of the most important pupil carrier group in Howard County: the Key Membership, which empowers loads of participants to interact in significant network carrier tasks. Taking a look forward, Peng will probably be a study colleague on the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Complete Most cancers Middle , aiming to be told extra about leukemia and most cancers genetics. He has unclouded aspirations to proceed contributing to the native and affected person network, with the eventual function of turning into a physician-scientist.
Jannette Pennywell
Program Coordinator at Johns Hopkins All Youngsters’s Health facility
In 18 years at Johns Hopkins All Youngsters’s Health facility, Jannette Pennywell has established herself as an individual who frequently is going the remaining mile. If the health facility’s bedrock has an tournament, she is bound to volunteer.
“Her heart for our hospital’s mission is palpable, her smile is contagious, and she exudes joy,” stated Sondra Boatman, a attendant who nominated Pennywell. “Her ability to connect with and support people, regardless of background or circumstance, is a direct reflection of Dr. King’s vision of a world free from discrimination and prejudice.”
“I try to put myself in their shoes,” stated Pennywell, a program coordinator within the health facility’s possibility control area. “People come to Hopkins All Children’s on their worst days. They’re sick, they’re afraid. I just try to see if I can bring a little light or joy to their day.”
Gina Wadas
Gina Wadas , who joined Johns Hopkins in 2017, has led her workplace’s annual holiday-giving efforts for the occasion six years. Following her govern, Wadas’s coworkers have participated within the Vernon Rice Memorial Leisure Turkey Program , the Undertake-a-Society program, and the Undertake-a-Senior program, donating presents, clothes, foods, and present playing cards to these in want.
Wadas may be an envoy for the Place of job of Sustainability , which seeks wastefulness relief thru higher recycling, compost, and incineration bin significance. Prior to transferring to Oella, Maryland, in July, Wadas usually spent a couple of hours every hour selecting up trash at the streets, sidewalks, and alleys round her Remington community in Baltimore.
Wadas encourages alternative workforce participants to search for volunteering and donation alternatives, noting that “Hopkins offers so many ways to give back.”
“I don’t believe in the self-made person concept,” Wadas stated. “We all get by with help from people in some way.”
Albert Wu
Lecturer on the Bloomberg Faculty of Society Fitness
For the occasion 10 years, Albert Wu has been running on bettering the fitness of family in East Baltimore by means of expanding communique and engagement between community-based organizations and Johns Hopkins hospitals and clinics. Since 2017, he has served as president of Baltimore CONNECT , a nonprofit community of community-based organizations, church buildings, and community associations that specializes in linking social and fitness assist services and products throughout Baltimore.
All over the COVID-19 pandemic, Wu helped determine a weekly convention name, next a Zoom assembly, to assistance distribute knowledge and provides. Since next, Baltimore CONNECT has given out numerous meals donations, in addition to more or less 900,000 face mask, face shields, and hand sanitizers.
“I’m amazed by the dedication of the people on those virtual calls every week,” he says. “CONNECT has become a two-way channel for getting information in real-time on what’s happening with residents in East Baltimore-and on what resources are available to help them.”
2024 Levi Watkins Jr. Beliefs Award Recipient
Erica Martin Richards
Worker Lecturer on the Faculty of Drugs, Chair and Clinical Director of the Section of Psychiatry and Behavioral Fitness at Sibley Memorial Health facility
All over the COVID-19 pandemic, psychiatrist Erica Martin Richards helped rankings of underserved family within the Washington, D.C., discipline who had been suffering with anxiousness, melancholy, and alternative psychological fitness demanding situations because of digital periods organized with the Sibley Memorial Health facility outreach workforce. She additionally spoke by means of Zoom with congregants of native church buildings who sought after to be told about numerous statuses affecting their moods and behaviors.
Now, the chair and clinical director of Sibley Memorial Health facility’s Section of Psychiatry and Behavioral Fitness continues to provide as a relied on network useful resource, running tirelessly to toughen the psychological fitness of girls and minorities.
“It’s really heartwarming to know that what I love to do is able to make a difference-and that other people can see that,” stated Richards. “It’s acknowledgment that I am helping our communities through ensuring equal access to care, from diagnosis to treatment to participation in research, and that representation matters.”
