Electronic Billboards

Over the summer, five plasma screens were installed in some of Hopkins Hospital’s most highly trafficked corridors. They are transmitting information about important initiatives and events around the clock and are expected to be key sources of communication during emergencies.

Operated remotely out of the Office of Corporate Communications, based at Bond Street Wharf in Fells Point, these “electronic billboards” are located near the soon-to-be-opened Broadway entrance and Wolfe Street and Metro concourse entrances, as well as in the Broadway corridor and Children’s Center lobby. (Several other similar monitors previously installed in places like the Cancer Research Building and Weinberg are not currently part of the OCC network.)

OCC hopes to install more screens in the hospital and eventually in JHM entities like Bayview, HCGH and Green Spring, says project manager Glenn Simmons. “It will be another way of tying Johns Hopkins Medicine together, a real opportunity to make everyone feel a part of the whole.”

Sci + Tech

Once known as the “biotech park” and then the “life sciences park,” the EBDI development north of the East Baltimore campus has been renamed the “Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins.” The appellation, developer Forest City believes, brings value and potential industry tenants to the park. “We preferred the previous versions because we do not want this to appear as solely a Hopkins project,” says Chi Dang, vice dean of research. “But Forest City is taking the responsibility and liability to develop the park, and they have decided that ‘Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins’ is best from a business viewpoint.”

Impromptu Wedding

The bride and groom, seated, with family and burn center surgeon Stephen Milner.

To the strains of a string quartet emanating from a borrowed CD player, the bride walked down the “aisle,” and the Rev. Herb Lodder, Bayview’s manager of pastoral care, performed a bona fide marriage ceremony. A nurse and social worker read scripture, and in-house paparazzi snapped photos, as family members and staffers, including the groom’s surgeon, looked on. “We really appreciated all you did,” the bride later told Burn Center staff tearfully. “You guys are really part of our family now.”

Photo credit: Jon Christopherson

Five weeks after WJZ-TV weatherman Bob Turk received a cochlear implant, anchorwoman Denise Koch met him at the Listening Center on JHOC 6 for his follow-up appointment. A cochlear implant is a complex electronic device surgically inserted behind the ear. A small antenna, worn externally, collects sounds that the computer transmits across the skin into the implanted device. The brain translates these sounds into meaningful words. Director of Otology/Neurotology John Niparko, who performed the surgery on Turk’s right ear, deemed it a success. So did Turk: “I can even hear my car blinker now.”