Hub staff, Jun 23
Five new members were inducted into the Indispensable Role of Blacks at Johns Hopkins during the university’s annual Juneteenth celebration on Friday, June 20.
The project celebrates the contributions of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members at Johns Hopkins by highlighting trailblazing figures who have strengthened the institution’s legacy. This year’s inductees are HIV researcher Joel N. Blankson, historian Nathan Connolly, engineer Cleon Davis, human resources leader Cherita Hobbs, and scholar Shani Mott.
“It is with pride that we honor the newest inductees,” said Calvin Smith Jr., the university’s deputy chief of staff for public safety and co-chair of the Indispensable Role of Blacks project along with Lorraine Smith. “Our distinguished honorees are leaders within Johns Hopkins and in their respective communities. Their achievements exemplify the excellence and resilience that define the legacy of Black faculty, staff, and students at Johns Hopkins. We are immensely proud to recognize their invaluable contributions and celebrate their enduring impact on our institution and beyond.”
Juneteenth recognizes the date in 1865 when Texas residents—including roughly 250,000 enslaved people—learned that all enslaved people had been freed. Although the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, and declared all enslaved people to be freed, the news did not reach Texas until two and a half years later. Celebrations have evolved over the years and often include not only festivities but also educational activities promoting the preservation of Black culture, and Junteenth became a federal holiday in 2021. Johns Hopkins observed the Juneteenth holiday on June 19.
More on this year’s inductees in the Indispensable Role of Blacks at Johns Hopkins:
Joel N. Blankson
Champion of science, dedicated mentor
As a clinical fellow at Johns Hopkins in the early 2000s, Joel Blankson encountered a patient living with HIV who, remarkably, required no medication to control the virus. Blankson’s fascination with the phenomenon—known as elite suppression—set the course for his pioneering career in HIV research.
Blankson first recognized the scientific urgency of HIV as a college student in New York City during the height of the AIDS crisis. Through a tri-institutional program across Cornell, Rockefeller University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering, he earned his Ph.D. in immunology and his medical degree back-to-back.
Now a professor of medicine and molecular and comparative pathobiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Blankson is internationally recognized for his leadership in HIV cure research. He was the first to clearly demonstrate that elite suppressors—those who control HIV without medication—aren’t protected by a weakened virus, but by exceptional immune defenses. His findings helped shift HIV cure strategies toward immune-based control rather than total eradication, offering hope that a “functional cure of the disease is possible,” his nominators for IRB membership write.
As a clinician, Blankson has led the inpatient HIV service at Johns Hopkins since 2008, his work at the bedside driving his clinical observations. As a teacher, he personally trained every Osler medical resident in HIV care between 2010 and 2020.
Blankson’s scientific contributions have earned him election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology, and he has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Clinical Investigation. In recent years, his research has expanded into immune responses in COVID-19 and Mpox.
At Johns Hopkins, Blankson has also played a critical behind-the-scenes role advancing diversity in medicine, reviewing hundredsof applications from underrepresented candidates and helping build a mentoring pipeline to strengthen graduate school, residency, and fellowship programs for more than two decades.
“That work matters to me,” he says.
Many of those he helped recruit are now faculty at Johns Hopkins and other institutions, his nominators note, “and still consider Joel to be their mentor and advocate.”
Nathan Connolly
Historian, intellectual leader
A leading historian of race, capitalism, and power, Nathan Connolly has spent his career exposing how institutions create and uphold inequality, with work that bridges academic scholarship and public discourse.
Connolly’s 2014 book, A World More Concrete, reframed the story of segregation by showing how landlords, officials, and developers in South Florida—where he grew up—profited by systematically excluding Black communities from property and power in the Jim Crow era. As a lead architect of Mapping Inequality, the digital project that made 1930s redlining maps accessible to the public, Connolly helped uncover how government-sanctioned racism shaped American cities. The resource attracted over a million users, becoming indispensable to educators, policymakers, and activists.
After earning his PhD in history from the University of Michigan, Connolly joined Johns Hopkins in 2008. He immediately saw the university as both a place of profound potential and a reflection of historical exclusions.
“I really do believe in the importance of universities as protectors of possibility for civil society,” he says. “But you have to be willing to take a close investigation of your own intellectual practices.”
That conviction pulled him into the university’s inner workings: faculty searches, committees, curricular reforms. He has mentored students, launched programs, and pushed Johns Hopkins to reckon more deeply with its own history and responsibilities. As director for five years of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship program (now the Chloe Center), Connolly helped secure a $4.4 million Mellon Foundation grant to amplify Black humanities scholarship and deepen ties to Baltimore communities. A major outcome was the creation of the Critical Diaspora Studies major.
“Students were telling us, ‘We can’t go out as doctors or scientists without understanding the cultural problems our patients will face,'” Connolly says.
With his late wife and fellow IRB inductee, Shani Mott, and Jennifer Kingsley, director of JHU’s Program in Museums and Society, Connolly co-led Housing Our Story, an oral history project recording the experiences of Black staff at Hopkins. These narratives—capturing exclusion, resilience, and dignity—helped fuel structural change, including the launch of the university’s Staff Advisory Council in 2023.
During his time at Johns Hopkins, Connolly has mentored an emerging generation of scholars who have become authors, professors, and leaders themselves, extending the influence of his teaching.
Connolly emphasizes that his legacy at Hopkins has been inextricably linked with Mott, a beloved Africana Studies lecturer who passed away in 2024.
“In all things, and in all ways, my time at Hopkins is her time at Hopkins,” he says. “She was my thought partner and collaborator, and so there is no distinction.”
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