May - Jun 2012 Issue

Physics professor Haiyan Gao explains her work on Duke's Office Hours program.      Video of Neutrons, Quarks and the Search for a New Force of Nature  

Christopher Sims ’95 goes to the imaginary front to document an unseen side of combat. When we think of war, our mind’s eye sees scenes of destruction and suffering. The war-related images captured by photographer Christopher Sims ’95 contain no battle scenes or wounded civilians, yet they provide intimate access to combat’s countless ancillary activities. Village Residence, Fort Polk, Louisiana  [Christopher Sims]

In evaluating the university’s actions surrounding now-discredited research data published by former faculty member Anil Potti, Duke research officers admit the university made mistakes in handling the case—and they are taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Roberto Olivares III ’88 has a longrange perspective on the experiences of Hispanic/Latino students at Duke. While he enjoyed his undergraduate experiences, there weren’t many other Hispanic/Latino students that he could identify with.

What was lost when the Woman’s College merged with Trinity in 1972? Why are women’s athletic opportunities still not equal to those for men, despite the passage of Title IX? How do state battles over reproductive rights and health care affect women disproportionately?

In its heyday in the late 1930s, the soapy radio serial The American Family Robinson aired on more than 300 U.S. radio stations. But as listeners followed the travails of Luke Robinson, a small-town newspaper editor, and his eccentric family, they were getting a heavy dose of political propaganda. Created in 1934 by the National Industrial Council—a front for the powerful National Association of Manufacturers—the program interlaced its plot with frequent screeds against New Deal policies and praise for unfettered capitalism.

FILM Garbage Can-Can When choreographer Allison Orr approached a group of Austin, Texas, trash collectors about creating a dance performance, she was met with silence and skepticism. A year later, on an abandoned airport runway, two dozen workers and a fleet of trucks—accompanied by a live music combo—presented a spectacle of sound and movement for an audience of more than 2,000 people.

Haiyan Gao, chair of Duke’s physics department, probes inside atoms to study the structure and spin of neutrons. A native of Shanghai, Gao was inspired to pursue physics by her father’s stories about female Chinese physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, who came to the U.S. in the 1930s and helped scientists unravel the chain of reactions needed to create the atomic bomb. Now Gao is designing experiments that test for the existence of a new, fifth, fundamental force of nature.

With an architectural style reminiscent of European castles, Duke’s West Campus looks like a place where you might find a princess. And on a Sunday in January 1967, it was.

Deep in the digital detritus of Becca Ward’s computer are some peculiar mementos of her days as a teenage fencing phenom. Sometime around age thirteen, when she began traveling the globe to compete in international matches, she started taking pictures of pigeons. It began as a joke—because how is a pigeon in Poland any different from one in Portland, really?—but the birds soon became a metaphor for her itinerant life. 

The Patient Sheema Hallaji is beat. After a double shift in the Duke Hospital pharmacy, she can’t wait to pass out. She changes out of her work clothes, pulls her hair back into a ponytail, and sets her iPhone at bedside. But before she can settle down into bed, a technician needs to mark her head with a green grease pencil and glue on a set of electrodes.