Clinician-researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have long reaped the immense benefits that come from being part of the larger university ecosystem of innovation. One notable example is the field of biomedical engineering, which was born here at Johns Hopkins in 1961. The department has since grown into an international powerhouse, with programs and collaborations spanning both the Homewood and medical campuses.

Over the last decade, the breaking down of silos between the university’s divisions has — quite intentionally — moved into overdrive, fueled in part by funding initiatives like Johns Hopkins’ Discovery Awards, internal grants for projects that bring together teams of faculty from different schools and campuses, as well as the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships program, which recruits world-class scholars (now numbering more than 60) whose research bridges academic disciplines in order to open new fields of inquiry.

Such cross-pollination is bearing fruit in exciting ways, as you’ll discover in this issue. In “Measure by Measure,” for example, writer Elizabeth Nonemaker shows how the path between the Peabody Institute and The Johns Hopkins Hospital is increasingly well-trod, as experts in music and medicine work in concert (I couldn’t resist the pun!) to define a new field of musician health and provide specialized care to hundreds of artists from around the region.

We also highlight the recent opening of Geriatrics Engineering@Johns Hopkins, a translational research center on the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Campus where faculty and students from engineering, medicine, nursing, public health and business are working closely with older patients and their caregivers. Their joint quest? To develop and test affordable, technology-driven solutions that will extend our “health span” as we age, enabling more of us to live independently and with dignity into our 80s, 90s and beyond. In describing the fertile flow of ideas the research hub has inspired, geriatrician Peter Abadir shared this pearl with me: “When you bring everyone together, then the magic happens.”

He and Engineering School Dean Ed Schlesinger are so sold on this “magic” they are taking it to a national stage, launching a new section in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS): JAGS-AI & Tech. The duo describes it as “a multidisciplinary platform for research, innovation and dialogue at the intersection of geriatrics, engineering, data science, business development and ethics.”

Look for more about this work in healthy aging — and myriad other interdisciplinary investigations underway at the “intersections” — in issues to come.