Christina Holder

Manjusha Kulkarni ’91, a Los Angeles community activist and attorney, knew she had to act. She met with the family of the injured student, worked with local school district officials on behalf of the family, and held a press conference to take a stand against violence against Asian Americans—a soaring statistic in 2020’s pandemic year.

People often warn, “Don’t start a company with your friends.” But Kevin Gehsmann B.S.E. ’19, Clark Bulleit B.S.E. ’19, now a first-year medical student at Duke, and Tim Skapek B.S.E. ’20, all former Duke football players and Pratt School of Engineering alumni, didn’t listen to that advice.

Samantha Lowe was hoping to spend her summer at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C. But when the rising sophomore learned that the internship would be canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she logged onto Ask a Blue Devil to ask for help.

During the search for his first internship, sophomore Kevin Ma hit a dead end. He had started off by going to career fairs, but came home only with swag. He stalked LinkedIn and job sites. He finally found his way to the Duke Alumni Association’s website—and there his career course shifted. Ma logged into the new DAA alumni directory and began searching for alumni in his area. He messaged several dozen—and much to his surprise, nearly everyone messaged him back.

On a search for a piano for a friend in the 1980s, Tom Townsend ’80 ended up in a St. Louis warehouse of forgotten ones—uprights, spinets, and baby grands in rows that seemed to go on forever. At the time, the lifelong pianist lamented the thousands of instruments gathering dust. He went home wishing there were a way the pianos could come home, too.

My grandfather cracks open his bedroom door and pushes his face carefully into the thin crease between the door and the frame.My mother is in the hallway.“Hi, Dad,” she says to his eye, backlit against a slice of bedroom light. “Come on out, Dad. It’s okay.”

As of July 1, you are the chair of the Duke board of trustees. What’s been rewarding about being on the board? One rewarding project that comes to mind: We did a study of the relationship of the Duke health system to the university as a whole. We did a lot of work on the financial side and the governance structures. That was right down my alley. Anything I’ve been asked to do at Duke, I’ve done—it’s that rewarding.

At first, the bees terrified Tara Chapman ’03. For an entire year, she wore a full bee suit, wrapping the cuffs of her sleeves and pants with duct tape before checking on two hives she had set up in her Austin backyard.

What’s a day like in your life as an entrepreneur? It’s chaotic! A lot of the ecosystem for an entrepreneur is staying involved and developing. So, I reserve two nights per week to go to networking events. Sometimes DukeGen comes to New York. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs through those events. The challenges we face are similar, and I’m reminded that this is a community that is always there for me.

August Mao M.P.P. ’16 talks about the power of Duke’s regional alumni networks.When I graduated with a master’s of public policy degree from the Sanford School this past May, I knew I wanted to move to Washington, D.C. It was the place to pursue my passion for technology policy and management consulting, and I was excited for what was ahead.

We hear that another Blue Devil—NBA Commissioner Adam Silver ’84—had something to do with recruiting you to lead the WNBA. Is that true?

Enrique Fernández de la Puebla Otamendi M.B.A. ’12 shares the experiences that led him to launch a regional group:On Orientation Day at the Fuqua School of Business in 2010, I remember professor Blair Sheppard telling my M.B.A. class that our experience could be “transactional or transformational.”

Why do you volunteer for Duke? I volunteer for Duke because I can’t say no to you. Like so many of our alums, I love Duke. I’m a first-generation student. Duke helped me find my voice. It opened up to me possibilities of what my life could be like. It helped me figure out what I wanted it to be like—and I want other students to be able to come here and have the same experiences I’ve had.

In her Santa Monica office, Amy Gravitt ’95 has a collection of television-show keepsakes one might expect to adorn the work space of an HBO comedy chief. There, on a stand in front of the TV where Gravitt watches dailies of the network’s shows, is the Louisville Slugger that actor Danny McBride used to hit out his frustrations when he played failed pro-baseball star Kenny Powers on Eastbound & Down.

Were there any favorite classes at Duke or professors who were particularly formative?

On a narrow concrete terrace leading into the shoebox apartment where Hannah Bonner M.Div. ’08 has lived since moving to Houston two years ago, more than a dozen plastic flowerpots filled with bok choy crowd together like visitors at her door.

Why do you volunteer for Duke? I love Duke. I had a really good experience at Duke. I gained a lot of wisdom and insight and knowledge that prepared me for life after Duke. I grew as a person. As a [Reginaldo Howard Memorial] “Reggie” Scholar, I was the recipient of financial aid, and so I have a lot to give back to Duke. What resonates more with you—your time as a student or your experience as an alumna?

As the 23rd secretary of the U.S. Air Force,  James is responsible for organizing and equipping the nearly 664,000 airmen and women serving throughout the world. James is a former president at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a company that provides information technology support to the U.S. Department of Defense, and was the assistant secretary of defense for Reserve Affairs during the Clinton administration. James has served as secretary of the U.S.

Under the glow of purple stage lights in Baldwin Auditorium, Jeremy Jones ‘02 is giving a drum lesson from his perch behind a sparkling silver drum set.As a videographer clamps a GoPro camera near Jones’ drum pedal, he jokes with her, saying, “You can sound really cool if you say, ‘Can I get some of that kick drum?’ ”

Freshman Melissa Gerdts was on a European cruise in celebration of her high-school graduation when she found herself in Paris for a stopover. Little did she know that the chance visit would reveal an unexpected connection with a fellow Duke family halfway around the world. Gerdts was in Paris on July 2, the date of the Duke Send-Off party to welcome the university’s newest class.

As the former cabinet secretary, senior adviser, and associate counsel to President Barack Obama, Gray spent more than five years inside the White House—advising the president and working on policies such as the Affordable Care Act. Prior to her tenure in the White House, Gray was the deputy director of the National Economic Council and worked as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.

There's a memory that Jia Jiang M.B.A. ’09 can’t get out of his head. He’s six years old. He’s standing before all of his classmates. He feels alone.

Farrell created a new emergency response app called CriticaLink after living in Bangladesh, where there are 160 road fatalities for every two in the United States. The app allows first responders to connect with doctors and trained health-care volunteers to address road emergencies in countries that lack an ambulance response system. It won Bangladesh’s 2015 National Mobile App Award in the Health and Environment category.

Toomey is the cartoonist behind Sherman’s Lagoon, a comic strip that follows the lives of ocean characters addressing environmental topics such as shark finning, ocean pollution, and threats to the world’s coral reefs. The strip is syndicated in 250 newspapers, thirty foreign countries, and five languages. He has won two Environmental Hero Awards from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “for using art and humor to conserve and protect our marine heritage.”

In the past five years, MOOCs—massive open online courses—have lived up to at least one part of their name. With hundreds of thousands of people enrolling in the most popular listings on sites like Coursera, MOOCs are indeed massive. But, as exciting as it may be to trade notes on Dan Ariely’s (Ph.D. ’98) theory of irrational behavior with a banker in Kazakhstan, sometimes you want something a bit more intimate.

THE VIEW FROM CAMERON In the future, we’ll see a merging between the virtual and the actual. Are we players in the real world? Or are we players who just act as if we’re in the real world? In Cameron Indoor Stadium for the Duke-Wisconsin game, the future arrived. The game was up there, on the giant scoreboard. But the game might as well have been down there, on the floor of Cameron, just below the concession stands with their (real-world) $8 box pizzas.

Stuart Jones is the former ambassador of Jordan and was the deputy chief of mission in Baghdad from 2010 to 2011. As a career diplomat, he has been stationed all over the world— including in Egypt, Turkey, Colombia, and El Salvador. President Barack Obama nominated  Jones as ambassador to Iraq in May 2014. Jones and his wife, Barbara, are the parents of two Duke students: Thad, a senior, and Dorothy, a sophomore.

Duke alumni involved in global health and social entrepreneurship are guiding students in an ambitious challenge to end the largest Ebola outbreak in history.

When David Shiffman ’07 applied to Duke in 2002, he wrote his application essay about the first time he swam with sharks. The then-landlocked Shiffman, who grew up in Pittsburgh, included an anecdote about consoling his father before his dive into the deep with an eleven-foot tiger shark—“Don’t worry, Dad; they don’t usually eat people.”

Moyle, the Duke Alumni Association’s new board president, majored in political science and history at Duke and received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He is the owner and chairman of Shindigz, one of the world’s largest Internet party suppliers. During his time at Duke, Moyle served as student-body president during his sophomore year and worked as a columnist for The Chronicle. Here, he talks about his journey through Duke and his new board role.

As NBC’s Parks and Recreation comes to an end, we asked the comedian, actress, and renowned Tweeter @unfoRETTAble to fill in our blanks. When I first arrived at Duke, I was…

It’s a mid-April morning in Highland Park, a neighborhood just north of Richmond, Virginia, where historic Queen Anne-style homes the color of popsicles give way to boarded-up buildings along a slight Main Street.

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.

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.

Shortly after Kareem Cook ’94 signed on to help organize his class’ 20th reunion, he uploaded to Facebook a series of digitally scanned pages from his old “pic book,” the class directory he received as a freshman at Duke.He tagged classmates, inviting them to take a virtual trip down memory lane, and then watched their comments appear.“Haven’t seen you since graduation,” one friend wrote to a classmate. “Would love to catch up.”