Sep - Oct 2012 Issue

  Photo above 1876: The original Trinity College Bell is cast. When Trinity College moved to Durham in 1892, the original bell was placed in storage and later relocated to a museum of university history in the Duke University Chapel tower. A second Trinity bell was hung in the Washington Duke Building’s bell tower.

[Credit: Natalie Sterneckert] ALUMNI ENDOWED UNDERGRADUATE SCHOLAR WHO: Sarah Watson ’16 WHAT: Duke Alumni Association’s newest Alumni Endowed Undergraduate Scholar HOMETOWN: Boerne, Texas

Jack Bovender ’67, M.H.A. ’69 grew up in King, North Carolina, a small rural town near Winston-Salem “where everybody was like everybody else.” When he arrived at Duke in the fall of 1963, Bovender was in for a culture shock. He encountered people who had attended prestigious private schools, courses that opened his eyes to the arts and humanities, and classmates from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, including Northerners, “who didn’t sound like I did."

Last October, Michael Kates ’80 called William Cohan ’81 with a tempting offer. Kates had found a great deal with a tour-company expedition to Mount Everest’s south base camp in Nepal. Was Cohan in?

Duke has a long and proud history of support from individuals, whose gifts have helped make the university what it is today. The largest of those gifts, such as the establishment of The Duke Endowment by James B. Duke in 1924, are well celebrated, their legacies literally cemented into the university’s physical campus. But the thousands of smaller contributions Duke has received throughout its history often reveal a more intimate portrait of Duke’s connection to its donors.

Paula Ehrlich ’84 may be the only foundation leader whose expertise includes environmental planning, equine surgery, bone physiology, corporate and academic research, and preclinical translational drug discovery and development.

It may take a village to raise a child, but sometimes it takes a university to help pull off a marriage proposal. David Kelley B.S.E. ’07 and Emily Schmidt B.S.E. ’07, M.E.M. ’12 were classmates in the Pratt School of Engineering, but knew each other only in passing. Back on campus for Homecoming 2007, they kept bumping into each other and ended up dancing the night away at the President’s Dance. Thus began a long-distance relationship that flourished.

The set was meant to be like a traveling version of President Richard H. Brodhead’s office in the Allen Building: a few high-backed leather chairs placed around a Gothic windowpane that looked over a “view” of West Campus. But for alumni who attended one of The Duke Idea events during the past four years, it was the conversations themselves—lofty explorations of topics such as leadership, education, global health, and the arts—that offered a true window on Duke.

OLYMPICS: Nick McCrory and Abby Johnston weren’t the only Duke athletes at the Olympics. Here’s a rundown of Duke’s ties to the games:

In the year leading up to the London Olympics, two pictures hung in the corner of the Taishoff Aquatics Center, home of the Duke swimming and diving program. Positioned between the ladder divers use to exit the pool and the one they use to summit the diving platforms, the images showed the inside of the London Aquatics Centre, the site of the Olympics diving competition. One was a full view of the arena from a spectator’s perspective. The other was taken from the top of the diving platform—the view competitors would see just before making an Olympic dive.

For playwright Martín Zimmerman ’07, all the world’s a stage—or at least all of the U.S. Based in Chicago for the past two years, Zimmerman was recently named a Jerome Fellow, the longest-running program of the Playwrights’ Center of Minneapolis, where he will spend a year developing a new full-length work. Zimmerman is no stranger to local theater; he has had readings and performances of his work in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, and Tucson, Arizona, to name a few. “It’s wonderful to see all the different areas of the country where people are excited about theater.

When composer George Lam A.M. ’08, Ph.D. ’11 wanted to produce an original opera as part of his dissertation, he started the Duke New Music Ensemble to ensure the work would be presented to a wider audience than just his peers and professors. “The Persistence of Smoke,” which ultimately involved several Duke departments and programs, meshed music with oral history and documentary to tell the story of Durham’s tobacco industry.

As one of the faculty leaders of the university’s DukeEngage program in Cape Town, William Chafe has seen the profound effect being in South Africa can have on undergrads. But he often felt the service- based trips barely scratched the surface of the country’s deep racial and cultural history.

In the dim, hushed depths of the library, the hidden voices of generations of Duke students are speaking again. They have been awakened through graffiti— decades-old thoughts, pictures, quips, and silly curses that were etched over the years on walls, desks, chairs, and shelves in the library stacks. Staff members rediscovered the graffiti this summer while cleaning out storage areas that were once part of the old Perkins Library stacks, giving new oxygen to the scrawled angst and boredom of hundreds of past students.

In July, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, announced they might have found the Higgs boson, the long-sought subatomic particle that explains how the fundamental building blocks of molecules accumulate mass. What does the discovery tell us about matter, the universe, and the future of physics?

So you’re a “Call of Duty” vet. You’ve spent hours simultaneously scanning maps, obliterating bad guys, and chatting with fellow gamers. Nothing gets by you. Surely you can navigate the perils of talking on a cell phone while driving. According to a study at Duke’s Visual Cognition Laboratory, not so much.

When Duke neurobiologist Erich Jarvis started trying to decode the genes believed to control a parrot’s ability to imitate its owner, he quickly ran into a problem. Typically, scientists assemble genomes in a process like building a jigsaw puzzle, using sequencing machines to crank out small segments of DNA code and then figuring out how to piece them together into a coherent sequence. But the regions that interested Jarvis—involving complex genes regulating brain circuitry—proved too complicated to stitch together from fragments.

On the long list of things parents worry about harming their kids, a little dust in the nursery seems pretty innocuous. But for Heather Stapleton, it’s a clue to a subtler threat—one that, thanks in part to her research, is getting new attention.

Aulander, North Carolina, is a one-traffic-light town in rural Bertie County, located in the state’s northeast corner. Most of the storefronts along its main street are empty. There are no movie theaters or grocery stores; residents drive to nearby Ahoskie to catch the latest Spider-Man movie or pick up supplies at Walmart.

In 1932, toddler Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped and held for ransom in a case that made international headlines as “the Crime of the Century.” Lindbergh, the first-born son of aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was later found dead. A Bronx carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann—who claimed innocence until the end—was eventually convicted and put to death for the crime.

What does it mean to be a person of faith in today’s world? Two new books—Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability, and Inclusion, by Mark Pinsky ’70, and The Messy Quest for Meaning: Five Catholic Practices for Finding Your Vocation, by Stephen Martin ’95—explore the question from different perspectives.

It’s a cliché of modern politics that a candidate for president won’t do anything—even choose a necktie—without first consulting poll data. True, both the Obama and Romney campaigns employ in-house pollsters to measure the subtlest aspects of message strategy. But do the results of those polls have undue influence on their political beliefs? Sunshine Hillygus, an associate professor of political science and an expert on polling, offers her insights:

With the nation’s health-care system facing a potentially critical shortage of nurses, Duke Medicine has announced it will double the number of advanced-practice nurses it trains, adding more than 200 trainees by 2016. The move is part of a four-year, $200 million project by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to increase the number of nurses with advanced degrees who can deliver primary care. Duke is one of five U.S. hospitals receiving HHS funding.

As North Carolina shapes up to be a key swing state in November’s presidential election, two Duke students—Daniel Strunk ’14 and Elena Botella ’13—are playing leadership roles in helping their candidates land the state’s fifteen electoral votes.

Like most students entering their final year of school, Pan Wu is looking for a job. But for Wu, who will earn his Ph.D. in chemistry in May of next year, the stakes of that search are especially high. If he does not find employment quickly, he will have to return to China.

"It would give me great joy if, through the labor of my hands, I could prove to you my sincere interest in this momentous day.” These words, written in 1821 by a German man named F.N.W. Kutscher, accompany an extraordinary wedding gift, presented to a bride addressed as Mademoiselle Lilli Kemmeter. At first glance, it appears to be an ordinary sewing kit, with brass handles, a floral pattern decorating the outside, and nearly 100 spools of silk thread in every color imaginable.

Duke will join a dozen other universities in sharing course content on the Internet through Coursera, an online educational platform. The experiment, which begins with a handful of courses this fall, promises to change education both on and off campus.

In the summer months, as students depart and the school grows quiet, it’s my custom to visit Duke sites away from campus. Duke is anchored in Durham, but Duke isn’t only what happens in Durham. Last summer I traveled to see our medical school in Singapore and global-health and DukeEngage sites in Uganda and Tanzania. But human challenges aren’t confined to foreign countries, so this summer, I set off to watch Dukies bringing intelligence and creativity to bear on problems in our own state and nation.

China’s Ministry of Education has granted preliminary approval for the creation of Duke Kunshan University, a key step in the progress of Duke’s first international campus.

When Christine Schindler was five years old, she decided she wanted to be an artist. Then, sometime later, she realized it was Broadway that was right for her. And then writing became her future career. It took Schindler until her senior year of high school to consider engineering, and she only did so because her parents told her it would be a good career to pursue. “Through high school, I just never really understood what engineering was,” she says. “But I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I just went with it.”

The catalyst: Computer science professor Richard Lucic and lecturer Robert Duvall decided to co-teach the course after realizing the department did not offer a class that exposed students to the softwaredevelopment process as it occurs in the business world. “If we don’t teach it to them here, then whoever hires them has to teach it to them through onthe- job training,” says Lucic.

Before he arrived on campus to begin his job as dean of the Duke Chapel, the Rev. Luke Powery already had broken new ground at Duke. An ordained Baptist minister, Powery became the first African-American dean of the chapel when he was named to the position in July. The thirty-eight-yearold pastor arrives from the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was the Perry and Georgia Engle Assistant Professor of homiletics. He is known as a compelling preacher and compassionate minister committed to reaching across boundaries.

On the surface, Duke’s recent acquisition of the collected documents of civil rights leader and theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is an academic and archival coup. The collection, which has never before been available to scholars, spans five decades and at least four languages, including notes and drafts for nearly all of Heschel’s published works, as well as intimate and extensive correspondence with some of the leading religious figures of his time.

Gospel quartet The Mighty Clouds of Joy will light up the Hayti Heritage Center for two shows in November, one of the highlights of Duke Performances’ 2012-13 season. Beyond featuring an always-eclectic mix of music, dance, and spoken word, the performance series puts artists in appropriately evocative venues. This year’s lineup features indie rock at Motorco Music Hall, smoky jazz at the Casbah nightclub, and a choral performance at Duke Chapel.