10-13-2024 W2W - Flipbook - Page 15
Ebony Thompson
46, City Solicitor, Baltimore City Law Department
Ebony Thompson is the first woman to serve as Baltimore’s top attorney. She’s also the first blockchain-specializing, karate-kicking, Marine
veteran daughter of Baltimore to occupy the office.
Charged with finding solutions for Baltimore’s vacant housing crisis
after joining the city in January 2022, Thompson, who studied blockchain technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spearheaded a project to log vacancies with the tool. A former litigator, she’s
overseen the office as it changes posture from defendant to plaintiff.
Baltimore has sued the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives and ghost gun manufacturers under Thompson’s watch.
The city’s lawsuit against opioid manufacturers heads to trial this fall.
A Baltimore City College graduate who once played women’s tackle
football but now settles for karate, Thompson brings a charm to the
job uncharacteristic of municipal attorneys. Exhibit A: The candy she
deposits on the desks of her fellow Board of Estimates members. In the
stately Baltimore City Hall, her boisterous laugh can be heard before
she enters a room.
Mayor Brandon Scott, who selected Thompson, said her tenure will
be historic not just because she is a woman, but because of her “passion,
heart and tenacity.”
“She’s breaking glass ceilings for young girls from Baltimore and
setting an example for every single young person in our city,” he said.
— Emily Opilo
PHOTO BY BARBARA HADDOCK TAYLOR
Rita Rastogi Kalyani
48, Professor of Medicine,
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
PHOTO BY BARBARA HADDOCK TAYLOR
From an early age, Rita Rastogi Kalyani saw family members in India
struggle with diabetes when she took childhood trips to the country
where her parents grew up. The chronic disease wasn’t something
she’d thought about focusing her career on until she entered The Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she graduated in 2003.
Now a professor of medicine in the school’s Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, & Metabolism and a clinician scientist who sees patients
at the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Diabetes Center, Kalyani focuses
on populations most vulnerable to complications from diabetes in her
research, including older adults. She founded The Johns Hopkins
Patient Guide to Diabetes website in 2016, co-authored two books for
diabetics and hosts a monthly podcast.
In January, she’ll become president of Medicine & Science on the
American Diabetes Association’s national board of directors — as only
the seventh woman and the first South Asian American woman to do
so, she said.
“The work that I do has been with the central focus of serving my
community,” said Kalyani, who lives in Ellicott City with her husband
and two teenage children.
“Diabetes affects people of all backgrounds, all ages, all genders, and
all races and ethnicities.”
About one in every nine people in the U.S. lives with diabetes, she
said, and it is a growing public health burden.
— Abigail Gruskin
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