Hopkins on the Hill: How Does Federal Research Funding Work?
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ABOUT THE PROGRAM
Ever wonder how we get money from the halls of Congress and the White House to a lab? Tune in for a primer on the federal budget process and hear firsthand what it’s like to apply for a federal grant from the experts! Join Cybele Bjorklund (MPH), Johns Hopkins Vice President for Federal Strategy, and Denis Wirtz (PhD, MS), Vice Provost for Research, for all your questions answered!
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Cybele Bjorklund is Vice President for Federal Strategy at Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine. In this position, Bjorklund deploys her expertise and experience to ensure strategic and effective engagement with the federal government, think tanks, and other federal policymakers across all areas of institutional interest. Her team is also responsible for federal lobbying and education activities, including integrating research findings into public policy, anticipating and responding to federal policy changes, addressing the most significant regulatory issues, and identifying emerging opportunities to advance the interests and impact of Johns Hopkins. Prior to this role, she served in senior policy leadership positions in the public and private sectors. Most recently, she was vice president and head of global policy at Sanofi, and held appointments at Georgetown University as a Distinguished Visitor at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and a Senior Fellow at the McCourt School of Public Policy. From 1995-2015, Bjorklund spent 14 years as the Democratic Staff Director for the Subcommittee on Health and senior health advisor for the Committee on Ways & Means, four years as Senator Kennedy’s Deputy Staff Director on the HELP Committee, and two years as a legislative advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. During her federal service, Bjorklund worked to improve Medicare, led in the creation of the Affordable Care Act, and developed many other laws affecting private health insurance, health IT, research, and other programs. Before moving to Congress, she was an analyst at CMS. Bjorklund is a Fellow of the second class of the Aspen Institute’s Health Innovators Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She is on the board of directors for the David A. Winston Health Policy Fellowship, and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Cybele received a master’s degree from The Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, with an emphasis on health policy and a concentration in law, ethics and policy, and a B.A. in journalism with an English minor from the School of Journalism and Communications at the University of Oregon.
Denis Wirtz, PhD, Vice Provost for Research and Theophilus Halley Smoot Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is known for his studies of the molecular and biophysical mechanisms of cell motility and adhesion and nuclear dynamics in health and disease, with a special focus on aging, cancer, and progeria. Wirtz directs the Johns Hopkins Physical Sciences-Oncology Center and co-directs the Cancer Nanotechnology Training Center, both National Cancer Institute-funded entities. He is a co-founder and former associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology. Wirtz earned a bachelor’s degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium (1988) and master’s and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering from Stanford University (1993). He did postdoctoral research at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI) in Paris, France.
Keri N. Althoff, PhD, is the Provost’s Fellow for Research Communication and an associate professor of epidemiology in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Medicine. As a Provost’s Fellow, she is expanding our institutional capacity to share research achievements. Dr. Althoff's research interest is aging in the context of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. She serves as the co-director of the North American AIDS Cohort Collaboration on Research and Design (NA-ACCORD), which is a collaboration of more than 20 longitudinal HIV cohort studies of adults with individual-level harmonized data. She earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Iowa, then her MPH and PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Prior to becoming an accomplished epidemiologist, Dr. Althoff worked in public relations and journalism. Her skills and passion for sharing research with broad audiences make her the perfect host for Hopkins on the Hill at Home 2021.
The perspectives and opinions expressed by the speaker(s) during this program are those of the speaker(s) and not, necessarily, those of Johns Hopkins University and the scheduling of any speaker at an alumni event or program does not constitute the University’s endorsement of the speaker’s perspectives and opinions.