Athletes who suffer from torn-cartilage injuries may soon be in luck. Mimicking the strength and suppleness of natural cartilage is tricky, but Duke researchers have developed a synthetic version that comes pretty close to the real thing. Articular cartilage, the tissue between bones and joints, enables us to bend body parts like elbows, hips, and knees. But overuse or injury can lead to wear-and-tear on cartilage, making movement painful and difficult.

Nearly 5,900 natural-gas leaks have been found under the streets of Washington by a research team from Duke, Boston University, and Gas Safety Inc. Some of the leaks could have posed explosion risks, according to the team. “Repairing these leaks will improve air quality, increase consumer health and safety, and save money,” says Robert B. Jackson, a professor of environmental sciences, who led the study.

Photos by Karen Webbink (top) and Robert Ayers.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.” 

WHO: Max Kramer

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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:

Laine Wagenseller ’90 felt helpless when he first met Adolf Baguma during a service trip to rural Uganda. Orphaned as a young child, Baguma had suffered debilitating burns when a teenage aunt threw scalding banana leaves on him as punishment for trying to get food. Baguma couldn’t walk upright—his legs were twisted by fused scar tissue—so he got from place to place by scooting himself along on all fours.

The new class of Duke Alumni Faculty Fellows includes a pioneer in the field of black popular culture, a law school faculty member who has worked on Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a scholar of applied and theoretical ethics, and a biomedical engineer specializing in biomaterials.

 Research by Matti Darden, Duke University Archives staff, and Sam Hull.  View the timeline in PDF form.

 Andresen

MEDICINE

In a first-of-its-kind operation in the U.S., a team of Duke doctors helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and transplanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease. The procedure, the first U.S. clinical trial to test the safety and effectiveness of the bioengineered blood vessel, is a milestone in the field of tissue engineering. The new vein is human cell-based product with no biological properties that would cause organ rejection.

It’s every kid’s dream come true: science supporting the idea that playing video games improves brain functions. Researchers from Duke’s Visual Cognition Lab found that hours spent with video-gaming consoles likely train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input. “Gamers see the world differently,” says Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. “They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”

On the HGTV show House Hunters, prospective buyers choose from several home options. The final decision comes down not just to cost, but also to the emotional investment potential homeowners have in a particular property. That link between emotions and perceived value is powerful—and Duke researchers have discovered why.

It may be quiet on campus, but the $3.25 billion Duke Forward campaign has kept activity humming during the summer. First, trustee emeritus Morris Williams ’62, M.A.T. ’63 and his wife, Ruth, pledged $5 million to Duke athletics. It’s the fourth commitment of $5 million or more to athletics since last October.

In response to North Carolina’s newly conservative legislature, several Duke professors have been participating— and getting arrested—in weekly rallies in Raleigh. Known as Moral Mondays, the rallies have drawn several thousand protesters, including faculty members from other universities as well as students and clergy members, who have assembled each week since late April.

Sarah Schroth, the Nancy Hanks Senior Curator at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, is the museum’s new director. Schroth has been serving as its interim director since November. She succeeds Kimerly Rorschach as the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the museum. An expert on Spanish art of the seventeenth century, Schroth joined the Duke University Museum of Art—as it was then known—in 1995.

More than 5,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students were awarded their degrees during Duke’s 161st commencement in May.

Growing up in New York in the 1970s, Michael Marsicano ’78, M.Ed. ’78, Ph.D. ’82 loved the English horn and the oboe. But with his sights set on medical school, he couldn’t see himself going to a conservatory. Instead, he chose Duke—a place known for training doctors that also had an outstanding wind symphony. Under the leadership of longtime music professor Paul Bryan, Michael went to Vienna with the Wind Symphony for a semester-long study-abroad program and concert tour.

Marriage of Jupiter and Juno (c. 1720-30), by Nicola Maria Rossi, is in the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection. Floating in the clouds at the center of a swirling entourage of winged attendants, the Roman gods Jupiter and Juno are joined in marriage by the young torch-carrying Hymenaus, god of weddings.

The Bryan University Center is full of campus activity, and it will be even more so once the West Campus Union closes for renovation this summer. With performance spaces, meeting rooms, student activities, the University Stores, and dining, it is an essential part of student life today. It might be surprising that the long saga of its construction makes it one of the campus’ most-debated and most-anticipated buildings.

How do Americans come together - and fall apart? That question fuels the works produced by Hoi Polloi, an Obie-winning New York-based theater collaborative.

  BASKETBALL:

  Peng Shi '10 (Credit: Gretchen Ert/The New York Times/Redux)

As part of the university’s 50th anniversary of black students at Duke, a number of regional events are setting the stage for alumni to explore the past and future of Duke’s commitment to issues of race relations and diversity.

Although still in its pilot year, the Duke Alumni Association’s Faculty Fellows program already has been well-received. With enthusiastic buy-in from the initial class of fellows to growing demand from regional Duke chapters for continued intellectual engagement with the university, the initiative formalizes an integral component of the DAA’s Forever Learning focus.

As East Coast-West Coast rivalries go, the quest to produce the nation’s top varsity lacrosse players is decidedly lopsided. Lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in the country, exploding at every level of play, from youth leagues to competitive high-school teams to clubs. Still, the country’s top athletes and colle- giate programs historically have been rooted along the Atlantic.

Robert Milazzo is a patient, persistent man. Back in the late ’90s, as he was figuring out how to break into the film business, he made it his mission to somehow connect with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet.

This was one commencement address not bound to be bobbing in the sea of the forgettable. It would not be especially “fun or breezy or grandly inspirational,” as the speaker (and the cultural phenomenon), David Foster Wallace, told Kenyon College seniors in 2005.

Andrew Fontanella could be forgiven for wanting to be somewhere else. At six foot three, with a tousle of curly dark-brown hair that adds another inch or two, he looms above everyone else in this cramped second-floor classroom in the generically named Medical Sciences Research Building on Research Drive. It’s 11:30 on a windy Wednesday morning in March, and Fontanella keeps an eye on the clock.

We all know bullying is painful to endure, but new research shows that bullied children are at a greater risk of developing anxiety disorders, depression, and suicidal thoughts as adults. “We were surprised at how profoundly bullying affects a person’s long-term functioning,” says William E. Copeland, assistant clinical professor in the psychiatry department. “This psychological damage doesn’t just go away because a person grew up and is no longer bullied.”

True or false: Women are more in touch with their emotions. Immigrants work harder than the native population. Answer: It doesn’t matter, because positive stereotypes like these are more underhanded than their negative counterparts.

The former head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration and current director of the Duke University Energy Initiative, Richard Newell researches and analyzes the economics of energy policy. In a recent Office Hours interview, the Gendell Associate Professor of energy and environmental economics discusses the myth of American energy independence and offers insight into current U.S. energy debates.

1. It really is a popularity contest: Rhesus macaques that have large, strong social networks tend to belong to families of similarly amiable macaques. Not only that, but playing nice with others tends to yield greater reproductive success. A corollary shows that the most aggressive monkeys have greater reproductive success—but so do the most passive monkeys. The loser? The monkey in the middle.

Let’s face it: Warnings regarding teenage smoking are as earth-shattering as those about alcohol’s deleterious effects behind the wheel. But new research from a team of U.S., U.K., and New Zealand geneticists adds an interesting caveat to the common wisdom. It turns out that teenagers with high-risk genetic profiles for becoming heavy smokers are far more likely to become addicted to smoking and have a harder time quitting as adults than those without the same precondition.

Renovations to the Bryan Center began during the 2012 winter break and are expected to be completed by fall 2013. The changes are designed to create more appealing and flexible spaces for students and staff members. This is the first major renovation since its construction more than thirty years ago. Here are a few changes to look forward to:

Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, former national-security assistant under President Gerald Ford and President George H.W. Bush, as well as former military assistant to President Richard Nixon LL.B. ’37, at the Washington Duke Inn. He spoke about foreign-policy challenges.

  Though this summer marks the inaugural DukeEngage program in Togo, its faculty director is quite established in the West African country. Since the mid-1980s, cultural anthropology professor Charles Piot has studied the politics, economies, and traditions of the Togolese people, conducting his twice-a-year fieldwork primarily in northern rural villages.

Eight U.S. universities, including Duke, have established the Vest Scholarship program, a “reverse Rhodes Scholarship,” to spur international collaborations among graduate students whose studies are focused on tackling some of the world’s biggest engineering challenges.

Global health has grown from a certificate program in 2006 to a full major, albeit one offered only as part of a double-major program of study. The major offers students a multifaceted approach to global health challenges and is one of the country’s first liberal-arts majors in global health.

After nearly thirty-two years of service, the Cape Hatteras has spent its last day at sea, at least under Duke’s command. The research vessel, which Duke received from the National Science Foundation in 1980, has been sold for $900,000 to the Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The catalyst: Assistant professor of chemistry and physics Patrick Charbonneau and visiting chef Justine de Valicourt not only share a history (Charbonneau and de Valicourt first met in their native Québec), but also a passion for cuisine. After a year of brainstorming, they are hitting the kitchen to cook up a freshman seminar class that infuses scientific savvy into tasty payoffs.

Future Blue Devils may soon greet each other with “Kusu dewo?” thanks to a new exchange program with the University of Virginia aimed at broadening the availability of low-visibility languages. Starting this fall, students in Durham will be able to take Tibetan-language classes, and students in Charlottesville will be able to enroll in Duke’s Creole courses.

Duke students traverse all sorts of distances before setting foot on campus, but few have covered as much cultural and geographic ground as Nash Mepukori.

“Why College May Not Be Worth It”—CNBC, August 10, 2012 “Saying No to College”—The New York Times, November 30, 2012 “Is College Worth It?”—Forbes, December 4, 2012

Sports medicine at Duke—a division of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery—will get a boost through a $20 million gift from Steven and Rebecca Jensen Scott. The gift will expand clinical and research program development, faculty recruitment and retention, and support for sports-medicine training, as well as providing support from the medical school. This is among several significant gifts for Duke Forward, the $3.25 billion fundraising campaign launched last September.

During a rousing keynote speech at April’s Reunions Weekend, U.S. Senator William “Mo” Cowan ’91 deftly combined the personal and political as part of the university’s “Celebrating the Past, Charting the Future: Commemorating 50 Years of Black Students at Duke.” His talk in Page Auditorium touched on the legacy of African-American students at Duke, his own campus experiences, and the imperative of providing high-quality education for minority students.

LACROSSE: Lacrosse players Casey Carroll ’07, Jake Tripucka ’13, and David Lawson ’13 were selected in the 2013 Major League Lacrosse Collegiate Draft. The 18th overall pick, Carroll is pursuing a master’s degree at the Fuqua Business School after serving multiple tours of duty as an Army ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.

1891: Students of Trinity College in Randolph County put on The Womanless Wedding—an appropriate production for the all-male student body. 1922: Female students in the Dramatic Club played all the roles in a production of Monsieur Beaucaire in March 1922. The Dramatic Club was coached by Gladys Gross, wife of chemistry professor Paul Gross.

For Aisha Taylor ’05, Duke provided a clear life-changing experience: a “Women as Leaders” course. The course was taught by Betsy Alden ’64, who spearheaded service-learning at Duke and is now an adjunct lecturing fellow in the Program in Education. Alden also helped start Duke Alums Engage, which plans service experiences for alumni in dozens of cities each year.

Here’s to you, Mrs. Merritt, onetime lunch lady at Banks High School, Birmingham, Alabama. It is the day before the 2012 Belk Bowl at Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium, and coach David Cutcliffe is discussing what he looks for in a potential recruit to his Duke University football program.

Steve Johnson M.H.S. ’02 is the new artist-relations’ manager for MerleFest, a four-day celebration of bluegrass, old-time music, Americana, country, blues, and rock. He’ll be in charge of selecting and scheduling the nearly 100 artists who perform on fourteen stages during the April event in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. MerleFest was founded in 1988 in memory of the late Eddy Merle Watson, son of Doc Watson, the American music legend who died this past May.

When the Swiss-based group ensemBle baBel began planning its headline presentation for the 20 Heures de Musiques-Romont music festival this past fall, it first considered performing a work by avant-garde French composer Erik Satie, whose abstract, minimalist works have inspired artists ranging from John Cage and Philip Glass to Coldplay and Lana del Ray.

Imagine, just for a second, the night before the first finals period of your freshman year. Your first semester of Duke has gone by in a flash; there are only seven more to go. Between trying to meet everyone in your class, joining new clubs, memorizing the C-1 bus schedule, and perhaps occasionally keeping in touch with friends and family back home, you might have forgotten that other thing—studying. Mild panic sets in, but then, that’s all right.

Birds do it. People do it. Now, Duke researchers are convinced that mice, too, can learn how to imitate songs to woo a mate. The surprising conclusion comes from a team of Duke neurobiologists who observed that male mice imitate the ultrasonic squeakings of other males. The researchers identified certain features in a mouse’s brain that are similar to the parts of the brain humans and birds use to learn vocalization, which suggests mice can pick up a tune.

So you’ve settled into the bathroom for a few minutes only to realize—too late!—you have nothing to read. Bryan Silverman ’15 and his brother Jordan share your frustration. It’s why they started Star Toilet Paper, toilet paper with advertisements printed on recycled paper in safety-tested, vegetable oil-based ink (like common printed napkins). Don’t turn your nose up, though. The idea was compelling enough for Silverman to be named Entrepreneur Magazine’s “College Entrepreneur of 2012.”

Newly arrived at Duke from King’s College in London, Luke Bretherton brings a fresh perspective on how Christian churches and faith-based causes intermesh with American political life. In a recent Office Hours interview, Bretherton, an associate professor of theological ethics and a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, describes four key “temptations” that pose problems for the church as it carries out its public ministry.

As winter recedes, millions of Americans renew their pledges to eat better and exercise more. And hundreds of scientists work to discover the keys to make those efforts more successful. Here’s the latest on what Duke researchers are learning about maintaining a healthy body:

In the ongoing struggle to find a better way to treat cancer, the hopes of doctors and patients have been buoyed recently by the revival of an old idea—using the body’s immune responses to attack tumors. But while immunotherapies have shown tantalizing promise, they’ve presented frustrating problems. In some cases, the immune system waged attack on healthy tissues and organs, as well.

For the discerning Duke student who wanted to jumpstart his or her international exposure and couldn’t get enough of the freshman Focus experience, last year’s Duke INtense Global (DIG) fit the bill. The three-semesterlong interdisciplinary program had its test run in India and Russia and featured culture-and language-immersion components.

Duke Law School’s Guantanamo Defense Clinic has been granted observer status by the Defense Department. Some clinic students are getting the chance to see military commissions in action. Law students Jesse Kobernick and Julie Coleman spent this past fall’s study break observing hearings at Guantanamo Naval Base. Other students traveled there early this semester.

The catalyst: Economics professor Neil De Marchi began to teach the course in the early 1990s as an outgrowth of his fascination with the art market and the ways in which it fits and breaks traditional economic theory. “It’s a beautiful context to inject a bit of critical thinking and skepticism into students’ previous economics coursework,” he says.

From late November to early December, a bit of United Nations alphabet soup hit the sweltering heat of Doha, Qatar. As part of the course “U.N. Climate Change Negotiations Practicum,” ten select master of environmental management candidates from the Nicholas School of the Environment attended the eighteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP18) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

About 200 people participated in an early-February protest sparked by a fraternity party that they said denigrated Asians. The protest sought to hold Kappa Sigma responsible for its “Asia Prime” party; the invitation to the party included stereotypical representations of Asian people and language.

What are the most significant years in Duke history? By my count, there are three. The first is 1892, when Trinity College moved from Randolph County to Durham, leaving its rural birthplace to seek a new urban setting and a new connection to the world. The second is 1924, when James B. Duke’s gift transformed a fine liberal-arts college into a comprehensive university.

David Mayer never knew much about his grandfather, Paul. He knew his grandfather had escaped a Nazi labor camp in eastern Germany during World War II and emigrated to the U.S. in 1949. But Paul Mayer died in 1985, before David was born. The reality of that experience remained distant for David—until he found a translation of his grandfather’s journal.

A $50 million gift from Anne and Robert Bass of Fort Worth, Texas, will launch an initiative to encourage students and faculty members to collaborate across academic boundaries—and to give them the tools to tackle some of the most vexing society-wide issues.

Opera singer: not the first career choice of your average Blue Devil. The typical opera singer, if there is such a thing, goes to conservatory, followed by a master's in singing, then a preprofessional program at an opera house, and finally, a career. But Talya Lieberman '07 has been forging her own path, one that will take her to Latvia on a Fulbright Scholarship to study her craft in a country with a little-known penchant for the musical form.

"Our city attracts more than its share of journalists and bloggers, essayists, and advocates, historians, and slam poets," writes Durham City Council member and The Independent cofounder Steve Schewel '73, Ph.D.'82 in the foreward of 27 Views of Durham. "They embrace the clang and clamor. They want to argue, proclaim, to laugh out loud, to write late into the night."

It takes brains to be good at math - as in, two halves of one brain, working together. That's the conclusion of Joonkoo Park, a postdoctoral fellow in Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, who led a study linking communication between the left and right halves of the brain to mathematical ability. Park had subjects perform simple math problems while he studied images of activity in their brains.

While it may taste good on a hot dog, mustard's spice is actually a form of chemical warfare - a tangy bit of self-preservation mustard plants mount to discourage hungry insects. But, as any mustard aficionado knows, there's diversity in that defense: Even wild mustard plants of the same species have an array of distinct flavors.

Title IX, the landmark federal legislation that celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, marked a breakthrough for female athletes at Duke, opening the door to full participation in varsity athletics on a national stage. But the desire of women to compete on a level playing field with men can be seen much earlier in campus history. Those aspirations— and the resistance to them—were evident during a curious event in 1934 called “Play Day.”

Credit: Sarah Deragon

In the late 1950s, an emerging early-music movement sought to develop a richer appreciation for the instruments and performance methods of centuries past. Musicologists delved into the difficulties of guessing a composer’s intent based on limited historical evidence, while instrument makers worked meticulously to create authentic reproductions of the original instruments.

Growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Morgenstern was surrounded by a community willing to have difficult conversations about social issues, ones he saw playing out regularly on the basketball court (where he was the only white player) and tennis court (where there were only one or two nonwhite players). Morgenstern brought his open mind to Duke, where he saw communities break down and come together over shades of black, white, and blue.

Family Weekend stars Matthew Modine and Kristin Chenowith as workaholic parents whose sixteen year-old daughter (Olesya Rulin) holds them hostage in order to gain their attention and bring the family back together. The quirky comedy, which opens in February, is in the tradition of such offbeat auteurs as Wes Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom, Rushmore), but in fact it’s the first feature-length film by a group of Duke friends.

Kavya Durbha ’16 struggled down a natural stairway of rocks and roots through a rhododendron forest. Drizzle glanced off her waterproof jacket. Her boots skidded in mud, her thirty pound wilderness backpack unbalancing her every step. It was the eleventh day of her Duke experience, and so far she had hiked through storms and watched dawn rise from the peak of one of North Carolina’s tallest mountains. Not bad for someone who hadn’t even yet moved into her freshman dorm.

A river cuts across a landscape, meandering past cities and farms, collecting rainfall and runoff, and supporting all manner of life. Since the beginning of civilization, humans have depended on this fundamental movement of water—but they haven’t always understood what was happening beneath the surface.

In his new book, Alexander to Constantine, Eric Meyers argues that Hellenism gave Judaism, and later Christianity, a cultural vehicle for expressing the faiths to worldwide audiences. Meyers, the Bernice & Morton Lerner Professor of religion and director of Duke’s Center for Jewish Studies, elaborated on archaeology and biblical narratives in a recent Office Hours interview. On what we can learn from early Christian archaeology

Before arriving at Duke in July 2010 as an assistant professor of public policy, Hal Brands had been sifting through documents captured after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq for the Institute for Defense Analyses. The institute opened the papers to researchers in 2010, and several papers by Brands’ team have been published recently, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the authoritarian regime.

When scientists at the Duke Cancer Institute launched a study exploring the biochemical changes inside brain tumors, they weren’t thinking about how to make a better windbreaker. But in a serendipitous twist, what they’ve learned about tumor growth may end up helping manufacturers produce nylon without relying on fossil fuels.

The catalyst: Associate professor of literature Negar Mottahedeh conceived the idea for the course after the 2009 post-election crisis in Iran, when protesters used sites such as Twitter, Balatarin (the Iranianbased social network), and YouTube to instantaneously share information and plan their actions. “Social media doesn’t create movements, but it allows for ease of organization,” she says.

Surrounded by a thick, green blanket of Amazonian rainforest, Iquitos, Peru, is the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by roads. Only a small airport and the Amazon River, which snakes away toward Brazil, connect its nearly 500,000 residents to the larger world. But that hasn’t stopped William Pan from making Iquitos a home base for his research.

Duke has cemented its place as the primary keeper of John Hope Franklin’s legacy with the acquisition of the late historian and former Duke professor’s personal papers.

On the surface, it’s not unusual that John Forlines III assigns his students to read Julius Caesar. It is, after all, one of the great literary works in history. But Forlines ’77, J.D. ’82 is an investment manager, and his students are economics majors. When they read Brutus’ famous line, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune,” they don’t discuss its eloquence or metaphorical flourish. They’re talking about market timing.

When Angela Mace A.M. ’08 sat down at a piano in the Nelson Music Room in early September, she awakened a forgotten bit of musical history. The sonata she played, a lyrical nineteenth-century composition known as Ostersonate, or “Easter Sonata,” had been performed before— but possibly never under the name of its rightful composer, Fanny Hensel.

One of the most potent sources of growth in the U.S. hightech economy has been foreign brainpower. Immigrants were responsible for more than half of the start-up launches in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005—and more than one in four new engineering and technology ventures nationally. But Duke’s Vivek Wadhwa says that trend has stagnated, putting the country’s leadership in high-tech innovation at risk.

After frustrating stints as a paralegal and as an intern at an engineering firm, Kevin Momber was looking for meaningful work where he could make a difference in people’s lives. Inspired by a friend who was planning a career in nursing, he enrolled in an accelerated bachelor of nursing program in Michigan. While earning his degree, he volunteered at a local clinic that catered to uninsured patients.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Parisian cognoscenti sniffed at avant-garde artists Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. But Claribel and Etta Cone, sisters from Baltimore, bought their works anyway, assembling what would become known as one of the world’s greatest art collections.

Inspiring is hardly the word most alumni would assign to the old Duke Linen Service Center, a nondescript warehouse off Campus Drive near East Campus. Gray and spare, the building befits its utilitarian roots as the site where massive quantities of campus bedding were laundered.

Duke’s annual Career Fair often can resemble a trading floor, with its chaotic buzz of sharply dressed young men and women in search of a deal. Despite the shaky economy and a weak job market, this fall’s fair was no different. More than 100 employers filled three levels of the Bryan Center, and they were descended upon by hundreds of students, all looking for a handshake that would secure their post-graduation success.

When Jamal Edwards ’16 was admitted to Duke during the early-decision period last fall, the California native was so excited that he couldn’t wait to get to campus. But as enrollment neared, he says, “I began to get stressed about all the logistics.”

“This is a great course and I am excited it is only the beginning.” “You have no idea how much this course is affecting me on a very personal level.” “I’m highly impressed and grateful for education like this.”

David M. Rubenstein ’70 was seeking a little inspiration. What he found, he told a packed Duke Chapel on Founders’ Day, was a message from beyond: a hopeful vision for Duke’s prolonged success.

In spring 2010, the rising seniors of the Duke women’s soccer team were not pleased. The fall season had ended abruptly with back-to-back losses in the quarterfinals of the ACC tournament and the first round of the NCAA championships. That might have been considered a decent season, but the team’s leaders, who had advanced to the Elite Eight the two previous years, expected more. During the team’s spring training, they gathered the team for a mental and emotional overhaul.

[Credit: Natalie Sterneckert] ALUMNI ENDOWED UNDERGRADUATE SCHOLAR WHO: Sarah Watson ’16

 

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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?

In the dim, hushed depths of the library, the hidden voices of generations of Duke students are speaking again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

When Jeff Howard ’76 first stepped onto Duke’s campus as a teenager from Minnesota, the beauty of the campus “took my breath away,” he says. “It was my vision of what a university was supposed to look like.”

Daniele Armaleo Ph.D. ’84 has been teaching molecular biology at Duke since 1975. Students now are not just exploring the microscopic components of life, but engaging with advancements in genetic engineering and genomics. Although the research frontiers of his field accelerate ever faster, the basics of teaching undergraduates have remained constant.

Proof of prognostication: Detail from 1870 Koskoo Almanac!

 

 

  Remember those not-too-distant days when people got excited about a camera with a couple of measly megapixels of resolution? Make way for the gigaage. Duke engineers have now developed a camera capable of capturing up to 50,000 megapixels—or fifty gigapixels—of data, five times better than perfect human sight.

Failure is a successful theme for Henry Petroski. As Duke’s resident expert on design and structure, he has spent almost three decades teaching and writing about everything from bridges to toothpicks to pencils to space shuttles—including what underlies design mishaps.

 

 

  How do you mend a broken heart? Duke medical researchers think they have a new way, using the very scar tissue that forms after a heart attack.

  Carla Antonaccio may not seem like a bullwhip-brandishing, Indiana Jones-type adventurer, but the classical studies professor nonetheless wound up in the middle of an international detective story.

  Like most start-up ventures, Duke’s two-year-old Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative has grand ambitions, which fall nothing short of remaking the university’s entrepreneurial culture. In May, the initiative received another critical piece to realizing those ambitions: a significant investment of capital.

  On the first day of her “Women in the Public Sphere” course this past spring, Rachel Seidman told her students they would be responsible for a single class project, one they would be inspired to continue even after the course finished. But no one imagined just how far that project would go.

  When Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke ’67, Gene Kendall ’67, and Nathaniel White ’67 arrived at Page Auditorium on Reunions Weekend in April, they assumed they would be watching the usual presentation of class gifts. But the three surviving members of Duke’s first cohort of African-American undergraduate students were in for a surprise.

 

Growing up in Canton, Georgia, Ken Hoehn wasn’t exactly encouraged to study the science of evolution. “The community I grew up in was very Christian-conservative, so evolutionary theory was one of those forbidden fruits,” says Hoehn, who first was drawn to science by collecting insects as a boy. “But I was always curious about it.” 

FILM Derrick Heggans '92: Beyond the Game 

As the son of contemporary art collectors, Jason Rubell spent a fair amount of his childhood at gallery openings and museum exhibitions. By the time he was a teenager, Rubell started buying artwork that caught his eye, using money he’d made stringing tennis rackets. But he never thought of himself as a collector until his senior year at Duke.

Dan Rittschof sweeps his scuba light across a sliver of the Neuse River. It’s 11:30 p.m., and he and his students are taking one last look across the water to see if any interesting creatures appear.

  Following passage of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in North Carolina, Duke administrators were unequivocal about how the amendment will affect Duke’s benefits and employee relations. Bottom line: It won’t.

After twelve years of teaching introductory and organic chemistry at Duke, Stephen Craig ’91 knows many of the most important moments in his students’ learning don’t happen in the classroom. “They occur at 2:30 in the morning, in the commons room of their dormitory, probably the night before an exam,” laughs Craig, a professor and chair of chemistry. “It’s when students are trying to work through the material together.”

Physics professor Haiyan Gao explains her work on Duke's Office Hours program.     

Christopher Sims ’95 goes to the imaginary front to document an unseen side of combat. When we think of war, our mind’s eye sees scenes of destruction and suffering. The war-related images captured by photographer Christopher Sims ’95 contain no battle scenes or wounded civilians, yet they provide intimate access to combat’s countless ancillary activities.

With an architectural style reminiscent of European castles, Duke’s West Campus looks like a place where you might find a princess. And on a Sunday in January 1967, it was.

Haiyan Gao, chair of Duke’s physics department, probes inside atoms to study the structure and spin of neutrons. A native of Shanghai, Gao was inspired to pursue physics by her father’s stories about female Chinese physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, who came to the U.S. in the 1930s and helped scientists unravel the chain of reactions needed to create the atomic bomb.

FILM Garbage Can-Can When choreographer Allison Orr approached a group of Austin, Texas, trash collectors about creating a dance performance, she was met with silence and skepticism. A year later, on an abandoned airport runway, two dozen workers and a fleet of trucks—accompanied by a live music combo—presented a spectacle of sound and movement for an audience of more than 2,000 people.

In its heyday in the late 1930s, the soapy radio serial The American Family Robinson aired on more than 300 U.S. radio stations. But as listeners followed the travails of Luke Robinson, a small-town newspaper editor, and his eccentric family, they were getting a heavy dose of political propaganda.

What was lost when the Woman’s College merged with Trinity in 1972? Why are women’s athletic opportunities still not equal to those for men, despite the passage of Title IX? How do state battles over reproductive rights and health care affect women disproportionately?

Roberto Olivares III ’88 has a longrange perspective on the experiences of Hispanic/Latino students at Duke. While he enjoyed his undergraduate experiences, there weren’t many other Hispanic/Latino students that he could identify with.

In evaluating the university’s actions surrounding now-discredited research data published by former faculty member Anil Potti, Duke research officers admit the university made mistakes in handling the case—and they are taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Deep in the digital detritus of Becca Ward’s computer are some peculiar mementos of her days as a teenage fencing phenom. Sometime around age thirteen, when she began traveling the globe to compete in international matches, she started taking pictures of pigeons. It began as a joke—because how is a pigeon in Poland any different from one in Portland, really?—but the birds soon became a metaphor for her itinerant life. 

The Patient Sheema Hallaji is beat. After a double shift in the Duke Hospital pharmacy, she can’t wait to pass out. She changes out of her work clothes, pulls her hair back into a ponytail, and sets her iPhone at bedside. But before she can settle down into bed, a technician needs to mark her head with a green grease pencil and glue on a set of electrodes. 

It’s a balmy, sun-drenched afternoon in late January, the kind of day when golfers will skive a couple hours to play a round or two. But up in the study room of the Karcher-Ingram Golf Center—a stately facility behind the Washington Duke Inn that serves as home base for the Duke golf teams—sophomore Laetitia Beck isn’t even looking outside. Instead, she is poring over a psychology textbook, her white earbuds buzzing with the sounds of pop music from her other home, Israel.

Matthew Hastings didn’t need a huge particle collider to split an electron. Instead, the Duke physicist did it virtually, with the help of several massive supercomputers. Illustration above: Fundamental particles Simulated experiments allow researchers to speculate how electrons might react under different conditions.

Nowhere on the Duke campus is spring more joyously revealed than in the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. The space comprises four distinct gardens that offer delights throughout the year. We asked the curators of each garden to pick a favorite plant species blooming within.

Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans ’39, Hon. ’83—lifelong philanthropist, civic leader, humanitarian, and great-granddaughter of university namesake Washington Duke—died January 25 at the age of ninety-one. A service in Duke Chapel the following Monday was standing-room daughter of Benjamin Duke, and Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr., a general in the U.S. Army who later served as ambassador to Poland and Spain.

Growing up on Long Island, Laura Gentile was immersed in sports from a young age. She attended U.S. Open golf tournaments with her father, and while still in grade school played goalie as her two older brothers practiced their street hockey slap shots. At Duke she was captain of the varsity field hockey team twice, and she continues to be an avid Blue Devil fan.

Michael DiLeo attended Duke during the late Sixties, when the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and other social upheavals led to student protests that rocked college campuses across the nation. “It was a crazy time in the world,” says DiLeo.

Before coming to Duke in 2008, Stephen Kelly spent twenty-eight years in the U.S. Foreign Service, holding diplomatic posts on four continents. Nearly a decade of that time was spent in Canada, where he worked on issues involving energy, trade, and border management.

When a few dozen students and faculty members gathered last fall for the first meeting of Duke’s Neurohumanities Research Group, neuroscience professor Michael Platt welcomed them by acknowledging the fuzzy boundaries of the fledgling discipline. “If you’re wondering what neurohumanities is, so are we!” he said.

Charles Dickens’ first novel, commonly called The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), sent the memorable characters Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller on a series of comic adventures through picturesque England. The book—a first edition of which is held in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library—also launched Dickens into prominence. The author, whose 200th birthday will be celebrated this year, became the publishing phenomenon of the Victorian age.

Only a hardy few of Duke Magazine’s readers were around when the university hired its first campus barber or published its first yearbook. If you’re one of them, David Goldstein wants to talk to you.

At Duke, “anxiety” is hardly an unusual word. But where does anxiety disorder come from? How about schizophrenia? Obsessive-compulsive disorder? Depression? These questions drive Ahmad Hariri’s course “Looking Inside the Disordered Brain,” which begins its third iteration this coming fall. While the course tends to attract biology and psychology stu- dents, Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, insists that the sub- ject matter is intended for a broad audience.

The days after the September 11 terror attacks—a period of high stress and anxiety for most Americans—turned out to be a relief for at least one group. Whales in Canada’s Bay of Fundy experienced less stress during the period after the attacks, when ship traffic came to a standstill, according to new research from the Nicholas School of the Environment. The research team relates the change to reduced noise from ships during the temporary lull.

When Don Young needed a biopsy to test for prostate cancer, he was ap- prehensive about the procedure. But he got some help from an unexpected source. Johann Sebastian Bach.

In 1975, the extreme racial segregation of many American cities led George Clinton and the funk band Parliament to record “Chocolate City,” which contrasted several cities with nearly all-black populations with their “vanilla suburbs.”

Born in Charlotte in 1911, Romare Bearden moved with his family in 1914 to Harlem, where he spent much of his adult life. He studied at the Art Students League of New York under George Grosz in the 1930s, and for much of the next three decades, he worked full time at the New York Department of Social Services, leaving only nights and weekends to paint.

It’s rare to see students out of bed at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, but East Duke 209 was packed beyond capacity for the opening lecture of “Flamenco Alive!: New Research in the Vital Art of Flamenco.” Perhaps it was the anticipation of the following weekend’s performance by the Flamenco Vivo dance company—or the promise of a master class led by Carlota Santana, Flamenco Vivo’s artistic director— but this was one academic symposium that got people on their feet.

Alone on a stage, senior Alison Kibbe has just finished speaking about feeling alienated for Christian beliefs, while at the same time feeling judged by other Christians. Naomi Riemer ’13, who has been listening intently, speaks up. “By the end of your monologue, you need people to realize that you’re not criticizing Christianity, but you’re criticizing the people who use Christianity to be selfrighteous,” she suggests.

As a freshman member of Hoof ‘n’ Horn, Nathaniel Hill had a minor role in Sweeney Todd, the first collaboration between the musical group and the departments of music, dance, and theater studies in a decade. Smitten with the scope of talent around him, he imagined someday bringing a show of his own to the stage.

What does a yearbook wish for on its hundredth birthday? Well, mostly just to keep on going.

By day, it’s a mild-mannered library, filled with studious but zombie-eyed denizens who prowl its stacks in strict silence. But on one night in late February, Perkins Library rolled out its secret identity.

For Andrew Leon Hanna '14, solidarity isn’t just another buzzword; it’s a generational imperative. In a closing ceremony at the 7th UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris, Hanna and 210 other conference delegates became temporary flag bearers for a country not their own. For Hanna, who chose to carry the colors of Sierra Leone, the act was a profound symbol of “how much of the same boat we’re in,” he recalls. “Beyond any difference, we’re all people seeking the same things.”

Asilent protest by around forty students on Martin Luther King Jr. Day turned a spotlight on an unpublished academic study, underscoring the delicate contours of discussions involving race at the university.

Noted journalist Fareed Zakaria will deliver Duke’s commencement address during graduation ceremonies on May 13. Zakaria, an editor-at-large for Time and columnist for the Washington Post, hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS, a news program on international and domestic affairs, on CNN.

On his first day at Duke, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey A.M. ’84 was mistaken for a priest. Given that he was recently named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and wears a chest full of medals for his military service—it’s a mistake not likely to happen again.

It won’t surprise anyone that the new Duke Cancer Center contains the most advanced technology around for diagnosing and treating cancer. Some of the standout features of the $235 million facility, however, are decidedly low-tech.

Tropical birds, trees may not be adapting fast enough to climate change.

New app can sniff out doctored files.

  Intestinal bacteria may determine whether statins lower cholesterol.

  Software developed for mine dectection may held doctors spot cancer cells.

  Study reveals surprises on teenage drug use. Despite what television shows and prison incarceration records would have you believe, a new analysis of teenage drug use finds greater problems among whites, Native Americans, and Hispanics than among Asian and African-American teens.

The Reverend Samuel Wells, who has served as the dean of Duke Chapel since 2005, will leave Duke this summer to become the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. Photo above: Godspeed Wells returns to England.

  Duke senior wins scholarship to study genetics. Photo above: Cambridge bound Daphne Ezer

 

Admissions introduces student bloggers to dish on Duke. In the picture-perfect world of many universities' admissions websites, a genuine reflection of campus can be rare. How do prospective students know they're getting the real scoop?

 

Pastoral ArtDivinity explores theology in creative expression.

Two major gifts boost financial aid, colleges. Photo above: Scholarly promise The Karsh gift will benefit programs such as the Karsh International Scholars, which admitted its inaugural class, above, this fall. Courtesy Milkie Vu

Photo above: Marble Chair,2008. Ai Weiwei, Beijing, China. Purchased with funds provided by the Estate of Wallace Fowlie, 2011.15.1.Peter Paul Geoffrion

 

 

   

Ketchup-packet-like pouch may deliver lifesaving drugs to newborns.

DEMAN weekend caps off celebration of campus arts.

 

  Nasher exhibition explores a master's influence on contemporary artists.

Call for Nominations for Board of Trustees

  Back in its November-December 1997 issue, the magazine's cover story looked at how Duke got so hot so quickly—how it evolved from a strong regional university to a national (these days, one would have to say a global) academic powerhouse.

 

  Duke's largest student production is a showcase of unbridles talent.