About Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, from a bequest by Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore merchant. The gift, for a hospital and a university, was the largest philanthropic bequest in the United States at the time. Daniel Coit Gilman, the first president, set the work as educating students, supporting original research, and carrying discovery outward. The university still summarizes that charge as “Knowledge for the world.”

The Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in 1889, and the School of Medicine in 1893. In 1916 the university opened the School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first independent school of public health in the United States. It is now the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Engineering is organized in the Whiting School of Engineering, established in 1979. Biomedical Engineering is shared by that school and the School of Medicine.

The Adler Archer Laboratory is one unit inside this structure: a laboratory at the Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design, directed by Adler Archer. Its work is applied social determinants of health innovation, with fellows, collaborators, and convenings in Baltimore and with partners elsewhere. The university supplies the schools, the hospital, and a long public-health tradition. The laboratory uses them on problems that sit outside the clinic.

Johns Hopkins University