Please join me in congratulating Yemok Jeon in winning this month’s Graduate Student Association (GSA) Student Spotlight Award! The GSA Student Spotlight awards two graduate students in the School of Medicine monthly for their academic and community achievements. Yemok was awarded for his wonderful work this summer:

Designed and taught the Blast course, Living Histories: Modern Traditional Medicine in Asia, creating an inclusive learning environment that combined theoretical lectures with experiential, vlog-style content. Enrollment reached 2,357 students worldwide, and a pre-course survey with 650 responses guided my approach. To improve inclusivity, Yemok invited students to share local and family-based traditions; 57 contributions from across the globe were curated into a public online exhibition, giving students a sense of accomplishment and visibility. By making the course free, asynchronous, and responsive to student feedback, Yemok expanded access to diverse learners while publicizing Johns Hopkins School of Medicine internationally.

Congratulations to Yemok on this well-deserved recognition, and for what I’m sure was a fantastic course!

Text by Jonathan Kuo, PhD Candidate & GSA Representative, Dept of the History of Medicine