Summer 2014 Issue

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FEATURES

  • Can pills crush the pain?
    Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in the Duke School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, offers an analogy for perceptions of mental health. “There’s this continuum between night and day, and there’s this moment, dusk, where you can’t really tell the difference between night and day.” Dusk suggests that there is no absolute of either; that it’s a question of degree. Likewise, Swanson says, we all fall along a spectrum of mental health: no one eternally “healthy” and very few irreparably “sick.” More likely, we’re approaching or just beyond dusk.
  • Phil Watson performs An Iliad
    “Nine years,” the Poet begins intensely, in media res. “Fighting on and off, fighting to the wall and back. Greeks win one day, Trojans win the next, like a game of tug-of-war.” He pulls at a black rope hung ominously from a scaffold. “And nothing to show for it but exhaustion, poverty, and loneliness,” he says, articulating each word with a maniacal kick to the air.
  • Oscar Dantzler
    They are the Perennials. Not a silky smooth doo-wop group, but the longtime employees who keep Duke running. Year after year they pick up the trash, help with IT problems, make sure club sports are run properly, set schedules for department heads, work the switchboard. Like mid-level workers everywhere, they are the people who keep the wheels turning and the engine running smoothly. Some have been around since Terry Sanford was university president. All have seen the changes Duke has undergone over the years.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

  • Having HIV testing close to one’s home makes in more likely that one will get tested. At the same time, HIV preferences vary greatly across individuals, according to new research conducted by Duke Global Health Institute faculty members. The findings could help inform how HIV-testing services are adapted and expanded across sub-Saharan Africa.
  • The education of Ida Owens youtube thumbnail
    In the spring of 1961, Ida Stephens Owens graduated summa cum laude from North Carolina College—now North Carolina Central University— with a major in biology. Just a few months earlier, Duke University’s board of trustees voted to integrate its graduate and professional schools. Owens came to the attention of Daniel C. Tosteson, then chair of the physiology department, who was recruiting accomplished students from black colleges to pursue advanced degrees in the sciences.
  • Paulie Harraka '12 is an independent racecar driver and founder of Paulie Harraka LLC. He focuses on breaking the mold in NASCAR with a unique group of investors. As a former representative of NASCAR's Drive for Diversity program, Harraka eventually hopes to use his company to help underrepresented drivers reach NASCAR. Sterly Wilder: While you were at Duke pursuing your undergraduate degree, you continued to build your burgeoning racing career. Who has helped you continue going after your dreams?
  • Duke senior Martin Shores’ grandmother made a mean steak. She had a way with food, transforming basic ingredients into delicious dishes, he says. Like a tasty carbonara pasta sauce, “which I still need her to teach me to make,” he adds. Shores has been thinking more about his grandmother’s cooking since he moved into an off-campus apartment, the first time he has had access to a kitchen since coming to Duke. But how does a soon-to-be graduate begin to learn how to handle cooking as nimbly as his grandmother?
  • Serve Where You Are Several hundred Duke alumni turned out to help their communities during Duke Alums Engage week in late April. Nearly sixty cities hosted DAE events this year, including international events in England and Singapore—making it the largest in DAE’s history. Alumni participated in projects such as preparing and distributing food, leading free health clinics, organizing day camps for children, and more. See what alumni did throughout the week on the DAE Facebook page. Follow Us on Instagram
  • Read more about these alumni who recently returned to give back to Duke students through mentoring, lectures, and words of wisdom.
  • Kara Medoff Barnett ’00 began taking ballet classes at the age of three and entertained the idea of becoming a professional dancer before she was sidelined with an injury in high school. By the time she arrived at Duke, she had switched her sights from arts to medicine, taking pre-med courses and volunteering with the student-run Emergency Medical Services group.
  • More than 2,000 students have participated in DukeEngage since it began in 2007. The program, in which students serve a domestic or international community in need, has become a Duke hallmark. So, it might surprise you to know that forty years before DukeEngage launched, Duke had developed an immersive community- service program based in Durham.
  • The study of the human body was intimately connected with art during the Renaissance era. From this visual culture emerged fugitive sheets, three-dimensional illustrations of human internal organs. Although widely disseminated from the 1530s until the late seventeenth century, fugitive sheets were typically printed as a single broad sheet rather than as part of a bound volume, explaining why so few exist today (hence the “fugitive” designation).
  • The old saying goes, “Yawns are contagious,” but have you considered the biology behind it? While previous studies have suggested a connection between contagious yawning and empathy, new research from the Duke Center for Human Genome Variation finds that contagious yawning may decrease with age and is not strongly related to variables like empathy, tiredness, and energy levels. The study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, is the most comprehensive look at factors influencing contagious yawning to date.
  • A Duke researcher has developed a 3D imaging technique for peering into the layering of a painting. Warren Warren, a chemist and biomedical engineer at Duke, develops laser systems to image human tissues. But he thought his work might be useful for art historians as well. One of Warren’s methods is pump-probe microscopy, which sends pulses of laser light into molecules to reveal their chemical makeup. While the pump-probe technique usually is used on biological pigments like melanin in skin, Warren applied it to analyze colors in paint as well.
  • Big changes are coming to Wallace Wade Stadium: luxury seating, a new press box, and maybe a sellout crowd are things to look for when you plan a visit for a fall Saturday in 2016 or beyond. One thing you won’t see? A track.
  • Nausicaa
    Japanese filmmaker and artist Hayao Miyazaki has won international acclaim for such visually stunning animated films as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Howl’s Moving Castle. In the early 1980s, Miyazaki wrote and illustrated the graphic novel Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which he later adapted for a film of the same name.
  • Is Duke good at risk-taking? I think we’re pretty good; compared to most of our peers, we’re pretty risk-accepting. Schools like ours have not only an opportunity but almost an obligation to take risks, to experiment in our academic work. Any university has to manage the power balance between central administration and the various units. How does that balance feel here?
  • In late March, newly renovated Gross Hall played host to the 2014 DataFest, a forty-eight-hour team competition in big data analytics. The event attracted close to 130 undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, including statistics, computer science, and engineering. Duke was the best represented school, but participants also made the trip from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and even Dartmouth College.
  • Samantha Emmert helps Victoria Thayer examine a deceased dolphin.
    “The rolling sand dunes and gentle waves of Emerald Isle are so picturesque that I almost forget why I am here: to conduct a necropsy on a stranded bottlenose dolphin,” wrote Samantha Emmert from the Duke Marine Lab in early 2014. Emmert spent her junior year researching an outbreak of morbillivirus epizootic, a measles-like virus that has ravaged dolphin populations along the Atlantic Coast since last summer.
  • THE CATALYST: In 2000, Congress passed legislation to create the Veterans History Project. Housed in the Library of Congress, the ongoing collection includes correspondence, audio narratives, and visual materials from veterans of every American war since World War I. Several years ago, Center for Documentary Studies instructor Michelle Lanier and then-visiting professor Elaine Lawless saw an opportunity to contribute to the project at duke.
  • Nour has fair skin and gray-blue eyes, accentuated by her ocean-colored hijab and dress. She tells us how in love she is with her husband, how he waited three years until she was old enough to marry him. She speaks of her son as the only bright spot in her life here in Jordan, the only happy moment. She details the horrors of her father-in-law’s public murder in Syria and even shows us pictures of his flowery burial on her cell phone. A lot more has happened in her eighteen years than in my own.   —Sasha Zients
  • One of the most joyous highlights of this past fall was the reopening of Baldwin Auditorium. Just as Duke Chapel is the focal point of West Campus, so Baldwin, with its graceful Georgian Revival dome, is the focal point of East Campus. Over the last two years, Baldwin has undergone a $15 million renovation in line with Duke’s philosophy of architectural renewal on campus: Preserve the historic exterior while creating state-of-the-art interior spaces to meet key campus needs.

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