Fall 2013 Issue

From the top of her perfectly coiffed head to the tips of her teeny-tiny toes, Barbie has become an iconic symbol of idealized—albeit unrealistic—feminine beauty. She has endured equal measures of adulation and criticism, from having her portrait painted by Andy Warhol to being banned in Saudi Arabia to inspiring countless doctoral dissertations on body image and femininity.

Duke has the luxury of celebrating many anniversaries. Originally founded as Brown’s Schoolhouse in 1838, it formed a constitution as Union Institute in 1839, was chartered as Normal College in 1851, then as Trinity College in 1959, and finally as Duke University in 1924. Nearly any year can be celebrated as a milestone.

By the time Doris Duke arrived in Hawaii, at the end of her honeymoon with James Cromwell in 1935, she had already begun planning a home in Palm Beach, Florida. Yet from the moment her feet hit the sand, Doris felt at home in the lush natural beauty and laidback rhythms of the remote territory. She also relished the quiet solitude the island offered. As the only daughter of James B. “Buck” Duke, Doris had inherited what would amount to $80 million from her father’s estate.

At the opening of Pleiades Gallery’s exhibition “Truth to Power” this summer, patrons included prize-winning architects, Duke professors, community activists, tattooed artists, blues musicians, local politicians, and curious passersby on their way to one of downtown Durham’s many hip restaurants. Located at the Five Points intersection, Pleiades has attracted a devoted following that reflects the eclectic Durham community. And that’s exactly the goal co-founders Kim Wheaton and Renee Leverty A.M. ’96 had in mind when they opened the gallery this past spring.  

In February 2002, Bill Wheeler M.B.A. ’93 decided to treat family friend James Suttenfield to a Duke home basketball game. Wheeler had grown up playing with Suttenfield’s son, and the elder Suttenfield had become a mentor after Wheeler’s father died. Wheeler knew Suttenfield had been awarded three Bronze Stars during World War II and had gone on to play varsity basketball at the University of Richmond.

During a recent deployment to Afghanistan, Phil Cotter B.M.E. ’10 and Seth Brown B.M.E. ’09 were brainstorming ways to honor members of the armed forces, past and present. They decided to draw on their shared history at Duke and reached out to other members of their Blue Devil ROTC battalion, all of whom are active-duty officers. Before long the idea for The Freedom 500 was hatched.

WHO: Max Kramer

SW: What made you decide to attend Duke? LJS: I had gone to a boarding school that was a feeder school for Wellesley. But I wanted to take a different route. When I visited Duke, I looked up Chapel Drive, and I said to myself, “This is what college is supposed to look like.” 

Deborah Lee James ’79 was nominated by President Barack Obama in August to be the nation’s next Air Force Secretary. If confirmed by the Senate, she would become only the second female secretary in the Air Force’s history and among the few female senior civilian leaders of an armed-services branch.

Regulating Water I read with interest your recent piece in the Summer 2013 Duke Magazine titled “Thirst for Knowledge” and share your appreciation for the important topic of water. However, as both the general counsel of Nestlé Waters North America and an alumnus of Duke law school, I’d also like to comment about the assertion made in the article that “most bottled water...is exempt from federal regulation.”

At press time, campus roads were a hodgepodge of orange cones, dusty digging vehicles, and neon-clad traffic-directing construction workers. Renovations are plentiful. Here’s an update on two of the projects:

The ancient and the modern come together in a new appointment at Duke. In July, Joshua D. Sosin Ph.D. ’00, an associate professor of classical studies and history, became the director of the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing, a new digital-humanities unit of Duke University Libraries. More impressive: Sosin is the first tenured faculty member at Duke to have a joint appointment in the library and an academic department.

Today you make a fresh start on an altogether new life. In it, you’ll have one and only one mission: to become the person you have it in you to be, a person equipped to lead a fulfilling life and to give the world the benefit of your gifts.

As origin stories go, the one behind Duke electrical engineering graduate student Nathan Landy’s involvement in a White House-sponsored panel is pretty mundane. No planets exploding. No radioactive insect bites. Just an e-mail request sent from a White House staffer in June.

The term “medical pavilion” doesn’t typically conjure up notions of comfort, yet much of the conversation surrounding the late-June opening of the Duke Medicine Pavilion seemed to be about the eight-floor, 608,000-square-foot center’s cozy allure.

The catalyst:

Great minds, they say, think alike, and the fifty-three impressive minds that converged for the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences agreed that both fields are key to the nation’s future. Indeed, the group, co-chaired by Duke president Richard H. Brodhead, went further, releasing in June “The Heart of the Matter,” a report offering three goals and thirteen recommendations for advancing the humanities and social sciences.

After a debate described as both passionate and civil, the Arts and Sciences Council declined Duke’s involvement in a pilot project offering for-credit online courses. The 16-14 vote (with two abstentions) reflected concerns expressed in April by council members that the proposal to work with the private, for-profit company 2U had not received a thorough vetting from faculty.

Student unhappiness about the handling of sexual-assault cases on college campuses nationally has led to sometimes loud, sometimes litigious conflicts. Duke students, too, have voiced their concerns, and in July, those concerns led to change.

You may have noticed a painful erosion of your local newspaper as the print media industry grapples with issues like soaring newsprint prices, slumping ad sales, and circulation declines.

Students wanted Bethzaida Fernandez, a lecturer in the Spanish language program, to take them home—not to her place in Durham but to her native Costa Rica. For the past two years, with a small grant from the Romance studies department, Fernandez has done just that. She’s offered fifteen students the chance to spend an alternative spring break in the Central American nation, in the town of Turrialba, caring for children and living with Costa Rican families.

With apologies to the toucan and parrot, a peacock’s plumage ranks highest on the aviary beauty scale. Yet those colorful contenders might find solace in this: Ms. Peacock may not be as impressed with the display as Mr. Peacock is. Duke neuroscientist Michael Platt and his colleagues attached eye-tracking equipment to the head of a peahen and used the resulting video to study courting peafowl at an outdoor enclosure. The researchers concluded that a male’s display, so impressive to humans, isn’t what catches a peahen’s eye.

It may not sound as appealing as turning water into wine, but turning human waste into clean water, energy, and useful byproducts is arguably as impressive—and can have longer-lasting health benefits. Duke engineers, working with a team from the University of Missouri, are working on a prototype of a self-contained “‘toilet” unit that will have the capacity to handle the daily fecal waste of about 1,200 users at a cost of less than a nickel per person per day.

The standard treatment for glioblastoma, the most common, aggressive, and typically fatal type of brain cancer, is surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Yet employing the grueling trio rarely brings success; tumors recur in 95 percent of cases, nearly half within eight weeks of treatment.

The director of the Neurocognitive Disorders Program in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine, Murali Doraiswamy is a leading Alzheimer’s expert and coauthor of The Alzheimer’s Action Plan. In a recent interview on PBS’ Newshour, Doraiswamy discussed new research that shows that rates of severe memory loss appear to be decreasing in consecutive generations. On the hopeful signs of the studies:

Computers can do a lot of things, but they can’t “see” video lacking a title, keyword, or description. And that can pose a challenge for law-enforcement officers seeking suspects or for investigators combing through hours of security tape.

Your aching back might get some relief if a new biomaterial from Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering succeeds in its intention. In a study, graduate student Aubrey Francisco and biomedical engineering professor Lori Setton describe a material designed to deliver a booster shot of reparative cells to the nucleus pulposus (NP), the jelly-like cushion found between spinal discs. The NP is important: It distributes pressure and provides spine mobility, which helps to relieve back pain.

Ibrahim Saber carefully chooses a piece of wrinkled fruit from the paper plate being passed around the room. He hasn’t eaten all day, but he waits a few moments longer. Holding it between thumb and forefinger like a sticky jewel, he closes his eyes. Silently, he blesses the fruit in the name of Allah. Then he bites in, chewing slowly, breaking his fast with the sweet taste of a medjool date.