BME Ph.D. graduate founder of local non-profit

Sarah E. Hemminger, Ph.D., a biomedical engineering graduate, is the co-founder of the local non-profit Incentive Mentoring Program (“IMP”). Sarah co-founded IMP, with her husband Ryan, in 2004 to mentor relationships between university-based volunteers and underperforming high school students who were at risk of failing to graduate. Starting in East Baltimore, the program began by building relationships between Paul Laurence Dunbar High School students and volunteers from the JHU East Baltimore Campus. In 2006, IMP became a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and in 2010 IMP expanded to a second site partnering with volunteers from the JHU Homewood campus and the Hampden-based public school, Academy for College and Career Exploration. In the 2011–2012 academic year, IMP served 95 students with over 400 volunteers. To date 100% of IMP students have received a high school diploma or equivalent degree and 97% of the IMP students have matriculated to college.

Sarah has been awarded fellowships from the Echoing Green Foundation, Open Society Institute, and Albert Schweitzer Fellows Program. Sarah received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2010 from the Johns Hopkins University for her work on the role of the cerebellum and the primary motor cortex on the time scales of consolidation of motor memory. She received the prestigious Siebel Scholars Award for outstanding work in the field of technology and engineering. Her research was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurophysiology and Cerebral Cortex. She has lectured internationally on her work and shared the IMP story at TEDx Baltimore. Sarah received her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University in 2002.

For their work with IMP, JHU volunteers have been recognized in various ways, including being awarded the Johns Hopkins Community Service SOURCE Award and the Johns Hopkins MLK Community Award as well as coverage in the local press.