One of the best ways to support our core academic mission is to invest in our people. Part of that is offering benefits that help our faculty, staff, and graduate students care for their families.

To that end, we have recently expanded offerings to allow time and resources for growing Hopkins families:

• The Family Leave for New Parents policy, introduced in summer 2017, offers paid leave to full- and part-time employees who have worked at the university for at least one year. Mothers and fathers have four weeks of leave at full pay after their child is born or placed through adoption, and employees who give birth have an additional six weeks of paid birth recovery leave.
• All eligible full-time graduate students and postdoctoral trainees can receive an eight-week accommodation to care for a new child with no loss in tuition benefits, stipend support, or benefits from a training grant, fellowship, or scholarship.
• The university began offering financial assistance for child care costs to doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows and trainees in December 2018. The program offers up to $5,000 per year to cover the cost of licensed dependent care to those with a child under the age of 6 and a net taxable income of less than $50,000 per family, along with access to a local child care referral service and to Care.com, which helps secure other caregiving services for hire.
• The university has invested close to $1 million in improvements of health benefits for graduate students and their families by adding new options for dental and vision coverage, lower deductibles for health care, and improved mental health coverage starting in the 2018–19 academic year.

Photo: Santosh Bharti, a research associate in the Department of Radiology at the School of Medicine, and Kanchan Sonkar, a research fellow in Radiology at the School of Medicine, and their identical twin sons, Samar and Sameer.