Jan - Feb 2006 Issue

Duke will play host to this year's North Carolina Festival of the Book, a series of lectures and discussions that will feature a lineup of best-selling and acclaimed authors, including Roy Blount Jr., Robert Olen Butler, Pat Conroy, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Spencer, and Tom Wolfe, along with many others who represent the changing face of the South.

Over the summer, Duke students, faculty members, and alumni traveled to Rwanda and neighboring Uganda on a trip sponsored by the Duke Divinity School's Pilgrimage of Pain & Hope to explore the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, during which more than 800,000 people are estimated to have died, and to document the nation's healing process.

With the naming of its newest Rhodes Scholars, Duke now has forty on that lofty list. Duke's first Rhodes wasn't precisely Duke's first Rhodes. He was Charles R. Bagley, a 1914 graduate of Trinity College, the university's predecessor. When he received the scholarship, in 1917, Bagley was a Trinity instructor in French.

With graduation and the inevitable job search looming, many students didn't waste any time during summer vacation. A series of Networking Nights brought career seekers and career advisers together in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. In the fall, Boston alumni got their chance with a Networking Night arranged by the Duke Club of Boston, in concert with Ivy Plus, a consortium of alumni clubs.

In 1989, history professor I.B. Holley was chosen to receive the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Circa 1929: Leftwich, with baton, and the Duke Orchestra

William Raspberry

Vioxx, the painkiller that was withdrawn from the market because it presented an increased risk of heart attack and stroke, may get a reprieve. A Duke study using mice suggests that low-dose aspirin might prevent such heart damage from Vioxx. The researchers' findings that a chemical imbalance might underlie such damage could also lead to the development of anti-inflammatory drugs without the adverse side effects, they say.

Aging rats and aging people show a gradual decline in learning and memory with age--although rats are not burdened with remembering anniversaries and the location of car keys.

Nominations for the Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor presented by the Duke Alumni Association, are being accepted for 2006. The annual award is made to alumni who have distinguished themselves through contributions to their field of work, in service to Duke University, or in the betterment of humanity. All living alumni, other than current Duke employees, are eligible for consideration.

Duke Medical Center has received a $10-million gift from the Preston Robert Tisch family of New York to support cancer research at the Brain Tumor Center at Duke and the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center. The gift, the single largest ever received by the cancer center, was announced just a month before Tisch, chair of Loews Corporation and chair and co-owner of the New York Giants football team, died of a brain tumor.

Faculty members from the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences explode in protest against the publicizing of dangerous problems in the environment through the common media [Under the Gargoyle, "Science Reality Show," November-December 2005].

First edition of Matthew A. Henson's autobiography, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole, Frederick A.

 David Brady. 

For the second year in a row, a two-and-a-half-pound robot named Wallter, designed by Pratt School of Engineering students, won an international wall-crawling robotics competition held in London.

Tragedy in Troy: Cassandra (Molly Fulweiler) confronts Talthybius (Martin Zimmerman)

On December 5, 1981, the Duke men's basketball team lost at home to Appalachian State University, 75-70. The next morning the telephone rang at the Rolling Hills, California, home of Jay Bilas, a high-school senior, an excellent student, and one of the nation's top prep basketball players. His mother answered the phone. The voice on the other end asked whether she had ever heard of Appalachian State. She replied that she had not.

A bearded man in a smart blue suit is perched on a stool at the front of the main auditorium in The Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Behind him is a flowing, black curtain framed by a vine of red and gold leaves. For over an hour, he and his colleagues have held the rapt attention of a crowd of more than 100. Offering an interactive presentation, they have garnered both laughter and applause. And now, as they finish, and as the theater lights shine brightly down on him, audience members leave their seats and make a beeline for the stage.

For Stuart Pimm and his group of graduate students, the trip always begins the same way--with furious last-minute packing, a visit to CVS for anti-malarials, and a final powwow in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

It was a complete sensory experience and a smooth meshing of past and present: classic rock 'n' roll, edgy new music, striking video images, dazzling pyrotechnics, an audience fired up with fervor about the band even before the first brash notes sounded. And plenty of opportunities to buy stuff.

The count is in: Twenty-two Duke graduates and graduate students were awarded 2005 J. William Fulbright Scholarships to study abroad for a year and otherwise benefit from living in a foreign culture.The Fulbright program, the U.S. government's premier scholarship program, was created by Congress in 1946 to foster understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges.

A Garland of Flowers Surrounding a Mocking of Christ

Liz Rusch is an optimist. How did she get that way? Hanging around with kids.

Humans all too often compulsively take risks we shouldn't--blowing our life savings on a get-rich-quick scheme, taking drugs we know could kill us, and letting our waistline grow to heart-stopping proportions. To their surprise, Duke neurobiologists have found that monkeys also like to gamble, and the discovery could offer important insights into the neural machinery underlying risk-taking.

Photo:Jon Gardiner

 Erwin Chemerinsky. Photo

William J.

Thanks to the senior capstone class of Duke's interdisciplinary program in technology and information science, the university now has a key piece of infrastructure that it long lacked: a user-friendly, online c

On July 23, 1973, President Richard Nixon J.D. '37, in a letter to federal Judge John J. Sirica, refused to comply with a subpoena seeking taped conversations from the Oval Office. He argued for executive privilege, writing, "It would be wholly inadmissible for the President to seek to compel some particular action by the courts. It is equally inadmissible for the courts to seek to compel some particular action from the President."

 User friendly: Carpenter Reading Room during exam week

 Students and alumni at a pregame luncheon Photos by Barbara Ha

Letting the deep layer of belly fat surrounding the internal organs go unchecked can have lethal consequences--that's the bad news. Physicians have associated it with insulin resistance, heart disease, and other metabolic disorders. But the good news, according to Duke physiologists, is that it only takes a moderate amount of exercise to keep this potentially dangerous form of fat at bay.

As part of an interdisciplinary, service-learning course, more than 150 students will participate in a course that analyzes natural disasters. "Natural Catastrophes: Rebuilding from Ruins" is co-sponsored by the Pratt School of Engineering, the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, and the Sanford Institute of Public Policy.

 

The first African-American basketball player at Duke, C.B. Claiborne, grew up in the last capital of the Confederacy. The inscription in front of the old Danville (Virginia) Public Library said so.

Redheads have long recognized--sometimes painfully--that they need to stay out of the sun because they burn more easily. Now Duke chemists have used lasers, microscopes, and clever analysis to explain how sun exposure could make redheads more prone to skin cancer than people with black hair.

The Research University Presidency in the Late Twentieth Century: A Life Cycle/Case History Approach

Calling it "crucial to Duke's long-term ability to attract the very best students and to make quality education affordable for all families," President Richard H. Brodhead announced in December that Duke plans to raise $300 million in new endowment funds over the next three years to strengthen financial-aid programs for students.

 Photo: Elizabeth Galecke

I work in management for a nonprofit, and am interested in a similar job in the private sector. My potential new employers want to know my current salary. Should I give it to them?