New student-run speaker series at Johns Hopkins focuses on health, medicine (HUB)

Tuesday Mar 6th, 2018

The new Osler Medical Symposium at Johns Hopkins was designed to fill a specific void, says senior Rushabh Doshi.

Though the university already hosts two successful student-run speaker forums—the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium in the fall and the Foreign Affairs Symposium in the spring—Doshi couldn't help but notice the absence of health sciences and medical topics in their lineups. It was a particularly glaring omission, he thought, at a university renowned for those fields.

At the symposium's March 2 debut event, Baltimore City Health commissioner Leana Wen was joined by two former city health commissioners—Peter Beilenson; and Joshua Sharfstein, director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health—as well as Michelle Gourdine, a former Baltimore County health commissioner. The conversation explored a range of topics, including drug problems in Baltimore and racial issues in public health.

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