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The League of American Bicyclists awarded a bronze Bicycle Friendly Business Award to Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, in North Laurel. APL was recognized for promoting employee health and social responsibility through its cycling club and cycling amenities. Some members of the APL cycling club commute daily and travel more than 24 miles each way.

When Sheri Lewis joined APL in 2001 as a public health analyst, an electronic disease surveillance system was just being developed at the lab. The impetus, she recalls, was Sept. 11 and the letters containing anthrax bacteria spores that were mailed the week after the attacks to several news media offices and two U.S. senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others.  “The data was there, but we needed to capture it and make it available to public health agencies in a more timely manner,” she says.

The Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab, near Laurel, is looking for a new director after its current chief, Richard T. Roca, announced Thursday that he is leaving. Roca, 65, took the APL post in January 2000 after a long career at AT&T, including as director of AT&T Labs in New Jersey, the company's research and development arm. APL scientists and engineers conduct research and development with a variety of partners, including the Navy and NASA. The laboratory is currently managing unmanned NASA missions to Mercury and Pluto.

“The combat system is the brain that helps you fire 'the bullet,' which is actually an extremely complex missile,” Danielle Hilliard says of her highly technical job in air and missile defense. She uses simple visual images to demystify her job as a rocket scientist working on ballistic missiles in APL's Space Department. As a program manager, the 41-year-old Clarksville resident has a dual role that requires her to work internally and externally. She communicates with engineers,  works across APL departments and with partners at such institutions as MIT and Penn State.

It is easy in this era of downsizing to lose sight of the full impact of industry layoffs. A ripple effect often reverberates well beyond those workers receiving pink slips, delivering a stinging blow throughout a region's economy.That will likely be the fallout of 350 layoffs at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Scaggsville announced this week. The plan is expected to affect more than 200 of the facility's 2,750 full-time workers and 140 of 700 contractual employees.

ONCE A month, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, a group of employees meets for APL PIE. Served not in the cafeteria but in a classroom, PIE stands for Parent Information Exchange, a support and resource program run by engineers who are passionate about parenting. "We just thought it would be helpful to working parents," said Jay Dettmer, who helped to start the group 15 years ago at the laboratory's North Laurel campus. At that time, Dettmer was going through a separation.

The planned layoff of 350 workers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel could presage a new round of job losses at other area defense and aerospace firms, defense and economic analysts say.The cutbacks at one of Maryland's largest defense contractors, effective in August, come at a time when the aerospace industry projects a loss of 34,000 jobs nationally because of a drop in Pentagon and civil aviation spending."

The first round of layoff notices -- 100 of them -- went out yesterday to temporary contract employees at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel.The layoffs are part of a 14 percent work force reduction at Howard County's largest private employer.And more are on the way, as APL prepares to lay off 250 of its own 2,750 staff employees, said Helen Worth, an APL spokeswoman. The next round of notices may go out as early as next week, but no later than the end of May, she said.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening is to visit the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Fulton at 10 a.m. today to promote a statewide effort to prepare students for the work force.The governor will meet with students in the mentoring program at APL, Howard County's largest employer.The students will discuss their experiences in Career Connections, a statewide program to prepare students for the ++ marketplace by linking them with employers.During his visit, the governor will sign a proclamation declaring May as Career Connections Month.

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) -- one of the state's largest military contractors and Howard County's largest private employer -- announced yesterday that it will cut its work force by about 350 jobs because of defense-spending cutbacks.The job cuts come just four months after APL officials dismissed layoff fears as "an ugly rumor." They will affect more than 200 of the laboratory's 2,750 full-time staff and about 140 of 700 contractual employees -- a work force heavily laden with high-tech researchers.

When Debra Buczkowski was 7, in 1976, NASA's Viking space probes were landing on Mars and sending images of the red planet back to Earth as part of their $1 billion mission. “I realized that no matter where I went on this planet, I couldn't pick up anything in those photos,” the New York native says, recalling how that mesmerized her. Her early appreciation for the wonders of astronomy led to a career mapping structures on other rocky bodies like Earth, such as Mercury and Mars, as opposed to the gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, she says.

When Elsayed Talaat first began working at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow, he was assigned to a project exploring Earth's atmosphere. That was 1999. To this day, he's still dedicated to the TIMED mission, analyzing the findings of the Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics spacecraft, a 1,300-pound instrument built at APL that has been orbiting Earth since 2001. Talaat's expertise makes him a fitting candidate to share the mission with the public through a new lecture series Beyond Earth presented by APL scientists at Columbia's Robinson Nature Center.

The League of American Bicyclists awarded a bronze Bicycle Friendly Business Award to Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, in North Laurel. APL was recognized for promoting employee health and social responsibility through its cycling club and cycling amenities. Some members of the APL cycling club commute daily and travel more than 24 miles each way.

Alvin Ralph Eaton, a pioneer in modern guided missile systems and the longest-serving employee at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, died of cancer Oct. 20. He was 91 and lived in Clarksville. Mr. Eaton's 66-year career coincided with — and he contributed to — historic developments in U.S. missile defense. He corrected flight problems in the first supersonic surface-to-air missiles, developed a widely used tail-control system for supersonic interceptor missiles, and helped shepherd the Patriot anti-missile program in the 1980s.

Amanda Song, a student at Cockeysville Middle School, was among five Baltimore County Public Schools students participating in the Maryland Department of Education's Summer Center for Space Science in July. The summer program is sponsored by the Science Applications International Corporation and the Northeastern Maryland Technology Council. Each day at the camp, students had the opportunity to work with NASA scientists and engineers to plan a space mission, including designing a satellite, building a scale model of a spacecraft, and designing a lunar robot.

Maryland institutions are involved in two of the three teams competing for $425 million in NASA funding to launch a new planetary mission in 2016. NASA said Thursday that the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California were selected from among 28 competitors for the Discovery Program funding. Each will get $3 million for preliminary design work. After a review next year, one will be selected for funding and development.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has signed long-term contracts with the Navy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that represent more than three-fourths of the lab's funding for the next five years.The $1.6 billion Navy contract ensures that APL will continue its role as a major developer of new technology for the nation's fleet of warships. The lab provides research, engineering and technical services on projects such as the Aegis combat system and the Standard missile.

You probably have more computing power in your pocket than what NASA's venerable Voyager spacecraft are carrying to the edge of the solar system. They have working memories a million times smaller than your home computer. They record their scientific data on 8-track tape machines. And they communicate with their aging human inventors back home with a 23-watt whisper. Even so, the twin explorers, now 33 years into their mission, continue to explore new territory as far as 11 billion miles from Earth.

If an envelope arrives in your office stuffed with a mysterious white powder, your chances for survival could be slipping away with each tick of the clock. If that powder proves to be anthrax, for example, and you don't get an effective antibiotic within the first 24 hours , "the chances of survival are slim," said Plamen Demirev, a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab. But it can take that long just to grow and identify any pathogens in the envelope, he said.