Johns Hopkins University
Maryland, USA
Mike’s affiliation with Johns Hopkins University began when IBM assigned each of its senior executives to work with a top American research institution in order to stay on top of the latest technological advancements.
After retiring from IBM, Mike wanted to continue his work with Johns Hopkins. Hence, he served as chairman of the board of trustees for Johns Hopkins Medicine, Johns Hopkins Health System Corporation, and The Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was also vice chairman of the Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees and involved in Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s implementation of its Genes to Society curriculum.
A generous benefactor to the university, Mike and Anne endowed the C. Michael Armstrong Professorship in Medicine in 2002 to support Johns Hopkins’ leadership role in stem cell research. That donation was followed in 2004 by a four-million-dollar bequest to support research in that field. The current primary beneficiary of this support is Dr. Greg Semenza, who in 2019 was awarded the Nobel Prize.
In 2005, Mike and Anne pledged twenty million dollars towards the construction of a new medical education building on the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s East Baltimore campus. The four-story Armstrong Medical Education Building, dedicated in 2009, houses state-of-the-art medical educational facilities that align with the latest models for teaching medicine.
Two years later, Mike and Anne gave another ten million dollars for the creation of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. The goal of this institution is to eliminate preventable patient harm, not only throughout Johns Hopkins Medicine, but at medical institutions across the globe (hundreds of thousands of patients die each year from preventable medical harm in the United States alone).
