Mar - Apr 2004 Issue

General Motors and Duke have reached an agreement on a multi-year, interdisciplinary teaching and research project aimed at furthering worldwide efforts to develop hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles by 2010. Duke's Fuqua School of Business is spearheading the project, with significant participation from the Pratt School of Engineering and the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy.

Numbers can be boring, but they also can be telling. The total raised for the Campaign for Duke, more than $2.3 billion, signals a lot about Duke's reach.

I'm a lawyer who's never "taken" to the legal profession. Can I look forward to other career options?

 Reading List We asked medical school professors to recommend good books in their specialties suitable for general readers.

This spring will mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square military crackdown in Beijing. At the time, Scott Savitt '85 was a twenty-six-year-old journalist, the newly hired Beijing bureau chief for United Press International.

 Photo : courtesy of Kimberly Reed '86

In a field where change typically occurs at a glacial pace (erosion, sedimentation, continental drift), geology professor Alan Boudreau's EOS (Earth and Ocean Sciences) 104S, "Volcanology," is almost too much excitement for one class--

 Campus canvas: renovations will put free expression on hold

 Accounting for accuracy: Skender hands out reward incentive. 

Researchers at Duke Medical Center have developed a new breast scanner designed to detect subtle changes in breast cells before a lump can be felt by hand or seen with X-ray mammography.

A man, living alone in a forest, stumbles across a baby eagle, taking him home, and raising him with the chickens. Some years later, a hunter comes along and frees the now-grown eagle.

 

Recognized as one of the greatest undertakings in both the art world and ornithology, Audubon's Birds of America (1827-1838) is a testimony to nature. Even today, more than 150 years after its completion, it remains a primary resource for scientists and scholars. Since Audubon's time, four species of American birds have become extinct.

This essay can only begin with an apology to the admissions office. Folks, I defrauded you. I didn't mean to, mind you.

 What better way to learn about design than to live in what you create? After a year of planning, Duke engineering students hope to see their ideas come to life in a "smart house" expected to house ten upperclass students each year.

Every spring for as long as some folks in east-central Kansas can recall, ranchers--like Native Americans before them--set fire to vast areas of tall-grass prairie as a way of returning nutrients to the soil and encouraging new growth. For more than a decade, photographer Larry Schwarm, a professor at Emporia State University in Kansas, has documented this annual ritual. His efforts are collected in a 128-page book, On Fire, published by Duke University Press, in association with Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.

December brought the end to the Campaign for Duke--and it was quite an ending. The university announced that it had received the largest gift in its history, $72 million from Peter M. and Ginny Lilly Nicholas of Boston. The Nicholases, both Class of '64, were co-chairs of the campaign.

It's been an unusually warm autumn on the Duke campus. In the last week of October, some spring bulbs are confused and begin to send up shoots. Leaves are falling, but not in the usual colorful rush of wind and rain. It is nearly seventy degrees this Monday morning as Mariana Carrera, a senior from Wellesley, Massachusetts, leaves her house on Buchanan Boulevard and walks to the East Campus bus stop for a ride to the Sanford Institute of Public Policy. Today there's another case study in international law to be examined with the help of political science professor Robert Keohane.

Herbie Hancock uses his hands and feet when he talks. When he says the word guitar, his hands strum an imaginary Fender. When he says record, his finger makes a needle and spins. Meanwhile he paces, gravitating back toward the piano keyboard again and again, though he doesn't touch it. He walks partway around the big Steinway grand. Lightly strokes its raised lid. Sits on the bench. Home base.

Robert Korstad had many places to dig as he researched a historic labor struggle in Winston-Salem, North Carolina--one that pitted a fledgling union of largely impoverished black workers against manufacturing giant R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. He interviewed dozens of union workers and activists who had fought for wage gains and better working conditions throughout the 1940s. He probed federal records. He pored over aging newspaper articles.

 Flath: "We all discover something". Photo: Jim Wallace

Duke's next chancellor for health affairs should be a physician with clinical experience, proven scholarly accomplishments, and national recognition in a medical sciences discipline. He or she should also have strategic vision, strong communications skills, and a demonstrated ability to lead a complex organization, according to new guidelines issued by the search committee.

 Black-figure Neck AmphoraAthens, 2nd quarter, 6th century BCE

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recognized retiring Duke President Nannerl O. Keohane by naming a new visiting professorship in her honor, and she was honored with one of the first-ever Marshall Medals at a ceremony in London.

Imagine a place where you could mingle with colleagues and friends, grab coffee, and listen to music. A place to kick back. That's what Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta envisions will replace the Bryan Center Walkway, which he calls more of a "conveyor belt" than a destination.

 

 

 Carded: education's entrepreneur. Photo: Chris Hildreth

Pooja Kumar '01, a second-year student at Harvard Medical School, was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, and Ethan Eade was named a Marshall Scholar. Each award finances two years of study in the United Kingdom.

Academics are the best part of the Duke experience, but students want more interactions with faculty members outside the classroom. Social life is suffering, with students frustrated by a lack of on-campus programming and by policies related to Greek life and alcohol. Duke students feel disconnected from administrators and want more opportunities to give feedback on university policies.

 Hart House: home to future leaders. Photo: Jim Wallace

After a five-week audition for the job, Ted Roof was tapped by athletics director Joe Alleva and a football search committee as Duke's new head football coach. He beat out three other candidates--former Detroit Lions head coach Bobby Ross, Washington Redskins offensive coordinator Hue Jackson, and Colgate head coach Dick Biddle '71.

Maureen QuilliganR. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and chair of the department, specialist in Renaissance literature, author of four books, wife, mother, would-be gardener Describe yourself in three words:

Cornelia B. Grumman calls herself "an accidental editorial writer." But the Pulitzer Prize she received in 2003 for her work at the Chicago Tribune has a lot more to do with passion than with chance.Grumman won newspaper journalism's most prestigious honor by calling for death-penalty reform in a series of editorials described by contest judges as "powerful" and "freshly challenging."

Joseph Nevins Ph.D. '76, James B. Duke professor of genetics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, is the new director of the Center for Genome Technology (CGT), part of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy (IGSP). He has been the interim director of the CGT since its founding in 1999. CGT develops and applies novel approaches to the analysis of the genome--an organism's complete set of genetic instructions.

 

Duke's board of trustees has approved the design of a new $115-million science facility to be named in honor of Duke trustee Melinda French Gates '86, M.B.A. '87 and her family. The French Sciences Buildings will bring together several disciplines under one roof to address major scientific challenges.

 

 

Orientation for new members led off the fall meeting of the Duke Alumni Association's board of directors, with the leaders of each alumni program updating and clarifying their programming missions. Then, following an opening luncheon at the Washington Duke Inn, the plenary session began with Ellen Medearis, director of major and leadership gifts for the development office, giving an overview of the Women's Initiative.