Winter 2013 Issue

As a high-school athlete, Parker Poliakoff ’14 played football, lacrosse, and golf, rowed crew, and was a nationally ranked wrestler who hoped for a walk-on position with the Blue Devils. But when back and knee injuries put a damper on his varsity aspirations, Poliakoff was forced to regroup.

Have you thought about helping a worthwhile organization in your community but are wary of an ongoing time commitment? Do you want to meet other Duke alumni in your area who share your interests? Duke Alums Engage (DAE) offers the perfect opportunity to work in partnership with a local community organization alongside fellow Blue Devils, friends, and family members within a well-structured framework supported by the Duke Alumni Association.

Whether you’re navigating the early stages of your professional career, experiencing a major life transition, or pursuing deeper engagement with issues that matter to you, the Duke Alumni Association’s 2014 Women’s Weekend promises insights, inspiration, and expert advice.

While service to others—and one’s alma mater—is reward enough for most volunteers, the Duke Alumni Association’s awards program recognizes the contributions of alumni who have gone above and beyond. These include: The Distinguished alumni award, the highest honor bestowed by the DAA recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions through their field of work, in service to Duke University, and toward the betterment of humanity.

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with Matt Koidin M.B.A. ’05, co-chair of DukeGEN and chief technology officer of Pocket. SW: How has Duke become more interested in entrepreneurship? MK: I think Duke has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but the launch of the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative has placed the efforts front and center. The core idea is that all students can benefit from this type of training—it’s not exclusive to starting a company.

Shirley Fulton J.D. ’80 and Robert Bridges Ph.D. ’79 are among the twelve individuals selected for North Carolina’s 2014 Heritage Calendar, which honors contributions to the African-American experience in the state. In conjunction with the calendar’s release, the N.C. Department of Public Instruction has developed lesson plans and other materials online that teachers can use in their classrooms.

In 1942, the incoming freshmen arriving at the Woman’s College were offered a simple stapled pamphlet titled Social Standards. This document, produced by the Social Standards Committee of the Woman’s College Student Government, offered advice on how to behave, dress, and act at Duke. It included regulations—including four involving

There’s an eerie elegance to the old bones of the Palaeopropithecus sloth lemur. Perhaps 8,000 years ago, the (then-living) lemur hung upside down in Madagascar. Nowadays, its skeleton rests like a hidden treasure at Duke’s Division of Fossil Primates on Broad Street, among more than 25,000 other fossils of the earliest primates and animals.

More than 800 students from China enrolled at Duke last year, a clear indication of the university’s popularity in the nation. Now, after gaining the approval of the Ministry of Education, Duke will have a formal home in the country.

“Ki’ap!” “Ki’ap!” “Ki’ap!” “Ki’ap!” “Ki’ap!” “Ki’ap!” The cries pop and echo across the room like a lit pack of firecrackers. Hands poised in loose fists, eyes narrowed in fierce concentration, nearly two dozen warriors advance upon invisible opponents beneath squares of fluorescent light in a room lined with blue foam. The traditional war whoop of taekwondo, ki’ap, helps focus the mind, flex the core, and summon the fighting spirit.

Oshri Hakak stood on the banks of the Ganges River in March 2012 and watched the lifeless bodies burn. He stood where countless others have stood through the ages, witnessing the sacred Hindu ritual that releases a person’s eternal soul from his or her earthly existence. For a young man pondering his place in the world, the stark reminder of human mortality and the enduring quest for spiritual transcendence was profound.

In her first documentary, The Lottery, director-producer Madeleine Sackler ’05 explored the controversy surrounding the role of charter schools in America’s public-education system. Now she’s turned her lens to protest art and political tyranny in Eastern Europe.

Phil Haus ’08 wants to pheed the world. More specifically, with Pheed—the new all-in-one text, photo, video, and audio social network—he wants to change the social-media landscape. The app, which debuted in November 2012, was dubbed “the social-media company of the year” by Business Insider. Yet the most impressive aspect of Pheed isn’t the convenience of combining aspects of Instagram, Twitter, SoundCloud, Vine, and Facebook in one app, or that it breaks the 140-character threshold.

He’s a political scientist, yet when folks seek to describe Peter Lange in his role as provost, the word most often used is “architect.” And so, as he prepares to step down in June 2014 and design the next chapter of his life, Lange is being lauded for the relationships he helped forge, the global bridges he helped champion, and the campus growth he helped spur. “Peter Lange has made his mark on Duke University as have few others,” said President Richard H. Brodhead in a statement.

Pleas for greater transparency could be this era’s most consistent cri de coeur. It’s certainly the call of DukeOpen, a student coalition that aims to increase the transparency of the university’s endowment. And while the group’s mission hasn’t been accomplished, its calls have brought change.

Bradley Hintze thrives on the adrenaline of moving with a purpose. In October, he pedaled 75 miles of rural road in coastal North Carolina for Ride Without Limits, an ultimate cycling event that benefits children and adults who struggle with disabilities.

There’s a significant difference between a bacterial infection and a viral infection, and, apparently, not discerning the difference has serious consequences. Although their symptoms are comparable to those of bacterial infections, viral infections cannot be treated by antibiotics like your typical Z-Pak. So when a patient sick with a virus takes an antibiotic, it allows certain bacteria in the body to strengthen and mutate. According to the latest report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 23,000 Americans die annually from drug-resistant infections.

The catalyst: “Wkh dwwdfn zloo frpphqfh dw gdzq.” You might see this as a bunch of gibberish, but a student in Nicholas Gessler’s class would advise you to change each letter into the letter three places before it in the alphabet. The “gibberish” is now a warning: “The attack will commence at dawn.” Gessler, an anthropologist and espionage enthusiast, is helping students examine how an intelligence agency communicates information.

Even Blake S. Wilson B.S.E.E. ’74 is in awe of the cochlear implant, and the electrical engineer is one of the core developers of the device. “Most of today’s implanted patients can understand everyday speech with hearing alone, without lip reading—many in noisy environments, some even on the telephone. To me, that’s a flat [out] miracle,” he told DukeMed magazine recently.

During the second quarter of this year’s football homecoming game against Troy University, Michael Holyfield ’79 finally got the respect he deserved. The first African-American Duke Blue Devil mascot was given a letterman jacket by the athletics department. “We wanted to honor him and the historical contributions he made,” said Jon Jackson, associate director of athletics for external affairs, in a statement.

You might not think of former CIA director and retired Army General David Petraeus as a jokester, and it’s probably best that you don’t. Yet when he visited campus in September for a question-and-answer session, he drew laughs with a joke about what happened (at a bar) when a Duke student asked a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student if he wanted to hear a joke about UNC. (Let’s just say it wasn’t favorable to UNC.)

About a month before students were slated to land in Turkey last summer, the city of Istanbul erupted in a fury of protests. What began as a peaceful sit-in to oppose the demolition of Gezi Park soon morphed into large-scale demonstrations and indiscriminate police violence. After careful evaluation, Duke administrators opted to go forward with theDuke in Turkey program as planned, according to Amanda Kelso of the Duke Global Education Office for Undergraduates.

In the ongoing conversation about the value of studying the arts and the humanities, some critics have pointed to the solitary nature of the humanist and the seemingly difficult marketability of a graduate with a humanities major as minuses. As it happens, the Media Arts + Sciences program, launched in October, takes on both of those issues, offering an interdisciplinary space where arts and humanities scholarship collaborates with natural sciences and social sciences to develop big, new ideas.

In a university of high achievers, class rankings can have real import. That’s why Trinity College and the Pratt School of Engineering are changing the approach to communicating student class rank based on grade point average.

Since launching in 2007, DukeEngage has aimed to give students an immersive experience that enhances them and community partners. In October, the initiative added four programs to its roster of thirty-six, allowing students to go deep into the culture and issues of cities in the U.S. and abroad. Students—up to eight in each program—can now engage in Detroit; Miami; Belgrade, Serbia; and Seoul, South Korea.

Intolerance, Mahatma Gandhi once said, is a form of violence and an obstacle to a true democratic spirit. Although those words weren’t repeated at the late-September opening of the new Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, it seemed a sentiment with which attendees would concur.

The popular perception of plastic is that it’s not the most resilient material we have at our disposal when it comes to wear and tear.

Tourists bring them home as travel keepsakes. But for ecologists tracking fish populations, menus are serving a wider purpose. Menus taken as souvenirs from seafood restaurants in Hawaii have helped a team of researchers glean important insights into the historical trajectory of the state’s fisheries. A critical part of that history—a span of forty-five years in the middle of the twentieth century—is obscured by the lack of official records.

Psychologists have long recognized the importance of embarrassment as a human emotion—its anticipation alone can moderate social behavior. Why, then, are spouses so quick to make each other blush?

Mbaye Lo, assistant professor of the practice of Asian & Middle Eastern studies and leader of this past summer’s DukeEngage in Cairo program, reflected during that time about Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. He believes the dreams of the 2011 Arab Spring are still alive, but that Egyptians are in a state of “political exhaustion.”

We’re all too familiar with the symptoms of prolonged exposure to UV rays. There’s the crimson skin, the itchiness, and of course, that overpowering feeling of lethargy. But what actually makes the skin hurt to the touch? A Duke researcher believes he has an answer for sunburned beachgoers: TRPV4.