Outstanding Recent Graduate Award 2015

Hannah K. Carter, Med ’12
Dr. Hannah Carter received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2012. Her research focuses on computationally modeling how DNA mutations in tumor genomes impact intracellular biological processes and cellular behaviors, and how these cellular level changes cause cancer. She is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine in the Division of Medical Genetics. In 2013, Dr. Carter received a prestigious NIH Early Independence Award for her project, Network Approaches to Identify Cancer Drivers from High-Dimensional Tumor Data.

Arielle Goren, A&S ’05
Since her graduation in 2005, Mrs. Goren has become a leader in communications and speechwriting, with posts in government including Senator Charles Schumer (New York), Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (Los Angeles), and Governor Andrew Cuomo (New York). Most recently she was the Director of Communications at Civic Entertainment in NYC where she led the outreach and marketing team for Mandela: The Long Walk Home, a feature film produced by the Weinstein Company. She is currently the Communications Lead at Uber in San Francisco. Mrs. Goren has been an active volunteer for Johns Hopkins, serving as Committee Chair for her 10th reunion in 2015, and Gift Chair for her 5th reunion in 2010. In 2010, her class broke the record for class participation, with 148 gifts.  In 2013, she helped create a scholarship in celebration of her class' upcoming reunion and in memory of two classmates who were killed during her time on campus. The Class of 2005 Memorial Scholarship Fund is an example of Mrs. Goren's commitment to the university.  It will support first-generation college students with dreams of attending the Homewood Campus.

Joseph Manko, Ed ’04, ’07
After receiving his bachelors from the University of California, Los Angeles, Joe Manko joined Teach for America and relocated to Baltimore in 2002.  He taught social studies at the Booker T. Washington Middle School while earning his MAT in 2004 and MS in Education with a focus on school administration and instructional technology in 2007 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Joe became principal at Liberty Elementary School in 2010.  According to Education Week, under Joe’s leadership, Liberty Elementary has been one of Baltimore’s highest performing elementary schools for the past five years and named Joe one of the people who will shape education in the next decade. He was also selected to be one of three principals from across the country for the Principal Ambassador Fellowship Program (PAF) with U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The PAF position provides outstanding principals who have a record of leadership, student achievement, strong communication skills, and insights from their school experiences an opportunity to highlight the voice of the principal within the education community and the country at large by working with other fellows and the Department.

Tolbert G. Nyenswah, BSPH ’12
Tolbert Nyenswah is a consummate public health leader who has made an enormous impact on public health in disease control programming in West Africa. He successfully led the fight against the Ebola outbreak in Liberia. A lawyer by profession, Tolbert completed his MPH at Hopkins in 2012. He was an effective program manager of the National Malaria Control Program in Liberia, a program that helped to reduce malaria prevalence from 66% in 2005 to 28% in 2011.  He became the Assistant Minister of Health and Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Prevention in 2012, leading the planning and organization of all the national disease control programs.  Tolbert really rose to prominence during the Ebola outbreak last year. The public health response in Liberia was slow in coming, and led to dire consequences. Tolbert persisted in trying to change the response, and by mid-August, he was put in charge of the Incident Management System. He inherited an epidemic characterized by fear and panic, yet through his leadership, optimism, and practical approaches, has used the available resources to build trust and mount a response to help tame the outbreak. He launched a domestic and international communications program, coordinated the many actors into coherent strategies, and engaged communities. The epidemic reproductive number had reached 2.8 by the summer of 2104, but since mid-August, has shown a steady decline, dropping to below 1 in late September — the break point for shrinking an epidemic is 1.0. Liberia was declared free of Ebola by the WHO on May 9, 2105. Tolbert’s leadership has saved thousands of lives in Liberia, and has laid a foundation to build sustainable public health systems for the future.