Start with Scrooge McDuck, swimming in gold coins. That’s the first image you get when you hear that the Duke University endowment, having recovered from the collapse of the investment market during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, reached a high mark north of $12 billion. Twelve billion dollars, as a pile of wealth, is more wealth than entire countries have (Fiji is estimated to have about $9 billion; Liberia, $11 billion).

Mike Krzyzewski called Shane Battier. This was in the summer of 1999. Krzyzewski was approaching the midpoint of his peerless career at Duke, and Battier, too, was halfway through his own stellar tenure at the school. But the situation at the time was one of unease. The Blue Devils had just had one of their best seasons ever and yet had ended it by losing a national championship game they were favored to win. Krzyzewski, meanwhile, had just had hip replacement surgery.

The year 2020 changed the world as we know it. These Duke alumni showed us that in the midst of unspeakable difficulty, we can lift up each other, come together, make change that has the power to change us all. The Duke Alumni Changemaker Award is a one-time award honoring individuals across schools who made a difference for their communities and the world in pandemic year 2020. 

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

Duke recently announced a new residential plan, QuadEx, which will connect the East Campus freshman dormitories to one of seven quads on West Campus. As QuadEx is being launched, we might look back at another time when residential life underwent a massive change.

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.

Each fall, the university community gathers to celebrate the founding of Duke—members of the Duke family and the giants on whose shoulders we have stood, those men and women who helped make our university the extraordinary place it is today. Many of these names are on buildings, quads, classrooms, and iconic spaces.

We asked Maureen Farrell ’01 about The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion (Crown), which she cowrote with Eliot Brown—the saga of the rise and fall of one of the most-valuable and most-hyped start-ups and its unusual leader.

Back in a distant era, the fall of 1983, I learned that Duke would be launching a new alumni magazine and hiring a founding editor. Quite an attractive opportunity: A startup magazine. A research university. A first plunge into the exotic South.

Late one sun-drenched afternoon in May, on the southwest tip of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Kelly Stewart Ph.D. ’08 was kneeling on the empty beach of the Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge when the park ranger pulled up on his all-terrain vehicle to see what she was doing.

The flight from Lima to Cusco takes an hour and twenty minutes, and the road from Cusco into the highlands climbs to nearly 20,000 feet. From there it descends, unpaved and passing along cliffs and through cloud forest and eventually into jungle over the course of ten, twelve hours. At the bottom is a little town, and from there one travels by river, because there are no more roads.

FOR THE UNITED STATES, the war in Afghanistan was the most protracted war in history—longer than World War I, World War II, and Vietnam combined. Shortly after the seemingly chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces in mid-August, the magazine convened a conversation among three individuals with very different perspectives on—and experiences with—the U.S. in Afghanistan.

In March 2020, as it became clear that we would be spending more time cloistered in our homes than ever before, I took up gardening. In the midst of chaos, digging in the dirt felt fitting, I decided. I would participate in a human experience that went back for millennia, in times of crisis and in times of peace. It felt universal.

On March 16, 2021, a gunman opened fire in an Asian-owned business in metro Atlanta, killing four people. He then drove about thirty miles south targeting another Asian business, where he killed three more people. And then, he crossed the street to a third Asian business and killed another person. In the span of an hour, eight people were fatally shot, six of whom were Asian women.

I watched the COVID-19 pandemic unfurl from Tokyo, where my family lives.

In Japan, a strong cultural imperative compels individuals to be sensitive to the needs of others. This requires complying with rules that can be inconvenient, and even nonsensical, but are understood to be for the common good.

At Duke University, surfing is not a career. Period.

I understand that

on some days you will nurse lonely

you will argue with mirror

swallowing distorted images

telling yourself that you are not this kind of ugly

you will select colors that say “available”

and draw on a face that will make you believe

that the last one who doubted your beauty

was both blind and stupid

I fear that in those moments

you will forget

in the middle of lonely

is one

Social studies is the lowest-priority core class, always. History is not viewed as being as central or important as math and English, and science got a huge boost with Sputnik, the growth of the U.S. space program, and now the focus on STEM areas. I’ve always somewhat begrudged the lack of attention. History teachers have always banded together in the knowledge that we provide the most important core content; after all, if you don’t know where you’ve been, you can’t know where you are going.

We began a conversation with Ed Magee M.B.A. ’04 on another topic, and we ended up deep in discussion about racism, anti-racism, and the enormous complexity of our moment. So when the topic of freedom came up, we naturally reached out to him, and he leapt at the chance to share his thoughts. “I’d kick off the conversation with the Nina Simone quote that the meaning of freedom is simply ‘no fear,’ ” he said in an email.

Here’s the deal: I don’t have a middle name. Of my seven brothers and sisters, I’m one of two who didn’t get one. All the other middle names were chosen with great care and consideration, laden with nostalgia, nuance, a bit of poetry. Me, I got zilch. Such, perhaps, is the nature of the middle child, a happy addition to a burgeoning family but spared, or bereft of— depending on one’s perspective—the intense focus on nomenclature that comes in the birth order with firsts and lasts.

You take political freedom for granted if you are in the 20 percent of the global population that the nonpartisan think tank Freedom House defines as living in a country that is mostly free.

Last October 30, Dave Kennedy, then the vice president for alumni affairs and development, unveiled a new structure for the staffs of the Duke Alumni Association and University Development. Historically, both of these organizations have reported to associate vice presidents who in turn reported to the vice president. Now these two offices would be merged into one organization under one new title—DUKE ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT—and one new vision.

We asked Monica West ’99 about Revival Season (Simon & Schuster), a coming-of-age story about the daughter of an evangelical preacher who each year takes his family on the road to heal souls and bodies.

On her not-straight-path to becoming a novelist

When Titi Shodiya and Zakiya Whatley launched the science podcast Dope Labs, they started not by talking about science, but instead by telling the story of their friendship.

“Zakiya and I met in grad school,” Shodiya Ph.D. ’15, a materials scientist and engineer, told listeners. “It was a tough time, to say the least. And in our pursuit to get the hell out of there, we became cousins. You know how Black folks do. She’s my play cousin.”

History may be written by the winners, but only as a first draft—a feel-good, simplistic, triumphalist view of the past. What about the history that endures? That’s all about asking tough questions, doing hard digging, and acknowledging stubborn complexities.

April Preyar ’96, a criminal defense lawyer in private practice in Chicago, was exhausted from helping one client at a time, arguing before a judge and jury, recognizing that 49 percent of Black males and 44 percent of Hispanic males will have been arrested by the time they’re twenty-three.

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

When she was growing up, Sima Sistani’s parents limited her TV time. One of the shows Sistani ’01 relished as a child was the sitcom Perfect Strangers, about a happy-go-lucky immigrant with an unbridled enthusiasm for all things American.

MARTHA ZEIGLER ’74 hadn’t attended a Duke Alumni Association event since the early 1980s. The retired certified public accountant and single mother had been raising her children. “My life was too full,” she says.

The algorithm had been designed to predict famine.

If famines were spotted before they started, more aid could be routed to the affected country, more people could be saved. Or so the thinking went.

WE ASKED

Theodore D. Segal ’77, a lawyer, Center for Documentary Studies board member, and author of Point of Reckoning: The Fight for Racial Justice at Duke University (Duke University Press), about his deep dive into the university’s history.

A COMBINATION of the shared distance of our current experience and the shadows of the past came together in December, when the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & the History of Medicine held a panel discussion as part of its Boyarsky Series on Race & Health.

Film producer, director, and writer Neil Creque Williams ’06 wanted to make movies by the time he was seven, when in second grade, his teacher let him show his home videos during lunchtime.

Brett Tyne ’97 can seamlessly switch from a Western Texas twang to a lyrical Scottish accent straight from the Highlands. Some might call her a modern-day Henry Higgins, but she’s really a dialect coach, who traverses the world to help actors learn tricky accents for movies and television shows. Tyne recently worked with Renee Zellweger to master the breathy Hollywood accent of the 1930s for her 2019 Oscar-winning performance as Judy Garland in the movie Judy.

As time has marched on through this pandemic and our cool spring days became long and hot summer days that turned to fall and now winter, it is so hard to believe that what I used to refer to as Alumni World Headquarters has now become my dining-room table and my laptop.

WE ASKED Marjoleine Kars ’82, Ph.D. ’94, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (The New Press), about how she found this untold story and what compelled her to write about it.

In his final year at Duke, David Perpich ’99 wasn’t keen on writing an economics thesis. He told his father that he had a better idea: working as part owner of Devil’s Delivery Service in Durham. “So,” Joseph G. Perpich fired back, “you want to deliver food instead of writing a senior thesis?”

“I said, ‘Don’t think about it that way,’ ” David Perpich recalls. “ ‘Think about the experience of learning about what it is to do something entrepreneurial.’ ”

In the spring of 2018, I joined a group of student leaders and student activists in a protest on the stage of Page Auditorium during Duke’s Reunions Weekend. This weekend was a gilded one, as newly inaugurated President Vincent E. Price welcomed generations of Duke graduates to revel in just how far the university had come on so many accounts. In fact, this was a special celebration of the legacy of student activism.

He appeared on East Campus one tobacco-scented September morning in 1998, his reportorial concentration rendering him as inconspicuous as a man in a bright white suit and spats can be. At the front of the sun-drenched, wood-floored classroom, history professor Ronald Witt (1932-2017) taught Petrarch and Bruni to a few dozen rapt undergraduates. At the back sat Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), scribbling away in a steno pad.

An art professor from the local college, having seen my kindergarten drawings, sought out my mother at a PTA meeting. The professor told her I had an innate talent that should be nurtured. We didn’t have the resources for art classes, and by the time we did, I had filled my days with other things, including a degree from Duke’s School of Nursing and a family of my own.

A few of our stories of realization came to us as spoken words, not as writing or images. We’re sharing them here as part of our podcast "The Devils' Share."

I was studying in my freshman dorm, Gilbert-Addoms on East Campus. 

A table away, a guy sat, also glancing occasionally at the TV, so we struck up a tentative conversation. He had on a worn T-shirt of pastel greens, blues, and pinks with an unfamiliar name in script. I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce it, and since we were having a pleasant talk, I asked, “What’s that mean?”

On October 3, 2009, more than 300 Taliban fighters overran Combat Outpost Keating, the outpost held by my reconnaissance troop of seventy-six cavalry scouts. During the eighteen-hour battle, the Taliban killed eight soldiers, wounded nineteen more, and burned our base to the ground. Describing my unit’s mission, President Obama asserted we had to “defend the indefensible.” This was the longest day of my life, but it only prefaced a struggle that has lasted for years.

This past May, as my immediate family gathered in my backyard to have a virtual high-school graduation for my middle son, eighteen years of memories rushed through my mind. It was at that moment that I realized my son had beat the odds and exceeded all the expectations that were made of him.

Turning points in life aren’t always recognizable. Sometimes they are a series of events, like mine, that last a year. The year I graduated from high school was a year of mini-revelations that were in fact harbingers of the life that lay ahead.

I can’t exactly pinpoint the day I realized I could no longer plan for my future, but it wasn’t long after I received an e-mail informing me that I could not return to campus. I was alone in New Orleans on spring break—a trip I’d planned months in advance. I had bought my plane tickets seven weeks ahead of my departure to ensure the cheapest prices, and I researched places to stay.

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the over-wrought heart and bids it break.”

Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 4, scene 3

Facebook Statuses

Monday, August 22, 2011, at 1:28 AM: 

“in pain. :-(”

Monday, August 22, 2011, at 8:31 PM: 

“tylenol pm means i’ll be out in 3-2-zzzzzzZZzzzzZzzzzzzz...seeyall tomorrow…lol”

It’s been four years, but it feels like it all happened yesterday. The first week of July 2016 was tumultuous. The nation was rocked by two killings of Black men at the hands of law-enforcement officials. On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling died in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after an altercation with police officers. Philando Castile was shot and killed the next day after alerting a police officer that he was legally carrying a gun.

When I walked out of my law job for the last time onto bustling Madison Avenue in 2011, I knew I was taking a risk. The 80 percent pay cut didn’t fully capture it; I was giving up a set salary for the precarious, gig-to-gig life of a tutor, the same one I had lived in my twenties before law school. I would be without health insurance; I still had six figures of student loan debt; my Visa was maxed out from re-furnishing my entire apartment because of a bed-bug scare.

BILL KAELIN LIKES A PUZZLE.

Not a crossword, not a Sudoku. You won’t find Kaelin playing Words With Friends, and Board Game Night was never a staple in the Kaelin household. A puzzle demands concentration. It demands focus; it requires you to pay attention to one thing at a time.

From the minute I arrived in the United States from Nigeria as an international student, my instinct was to look for an African community—a restaurant, a mosque, an association. And in the African diasporic community, I found happiness, a sense of belonging. However, as a photojournalist, I wondered why so many of us Africans leave home. What was the pull to the United States or to Europe?

I am writing two weeks after the murder of George Floyd, as protests against white supremacy take place across the country. Many Americans are reckoning with the impact of racism, especially as it relates to American history. I, too, am reckoning with the past, especially here at Duke. There are hard truths to accept in a place where many people feel warmly embraced—a place that many of us love.

Years before COVID-19 turned the educational world topsy-turvy, Douglas Michelman ’82 was concerned about the “homework gap.” Michelman had joined Sprint as the chief communications officer in 2014, and because his portfolio included corporate responsibility, the CEO asked him to reimagine how Sprint could create social impact in a relevant way.

One day, a male peer pulled Lauren Hasson ’04 aside and complained to her about how little he was making. “I was stunned to learn that not only was he making exactly what I was making at the time, but he had been hired at 50 percent more,” says Hasson. “That’s 5-0—50 percent more than me—when I was at his level.”

This issue, I’m lending this space to the new DAA president, Mychal Harrison ’01, who has a special message for all alumni. —Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president, alumni affairs

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.

People who watched A Parks and Recreation Special, the one-off reunion show about the TV series’ characters coping with the COVID-19 lockdown (it ran in early May), knew they were seeing something remarkable. Sure, the laughs were there: The characters spent the half-hour special addressing their situation in the surreal and witty way that defined the show.

Protests sparked by police actions. Anxiety over (invented) outside agitators. “Lawand- order” leaders drawn into competing crises. Media accounts—Newsweek, in one case—offering assessments that to be Black in America is to assume “that America is after all a racist society.”

Caitlin Margaret Kelly M.F.A. ’14 studies a photo of a back-to-the-lander teaching a younger woman how to aim a rifle, then slides it along the floor toward the center of a wall. Placed there, though, the gun appears to threaten the boy in the photo next to it, standing in his patch of poison ivy. She moves it again, but here it targets a decaying church, its steeple slumping into its sanctuary.

Memorial Day 2020 and Carteret County was as mobbed by tourists as Liz DeMattia has ever seen it.

This issue’s long-planned cover story follows one researcher’s fixation on developing an AIDS vaccine. We could not have planned for what’s become a fresh global fixation, on the coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China. By late January, it had disrupted university-supported travel to China and had rejiggered the academic calendar at Duke Kunshan University.

Even when published in book form, academic dissertations rarely get much attention. But “The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution,” which earned Julius S. Scott Ph.D. ’86 his doctorate, is the rare exception. After its completion in 1987, “The Common Wind” attracted interest from a few publishers. But Scott was not prepared to undertake the revisions that publishers and he himself felt were necessary.

We asked Laura Huang B.S.E. ’00, M.S. ’01, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and author of Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage, about why she believes you can flip stereotypes and obstacles in your favor.

On how her research reconsiders hard work:

PAUL SIEFKEN ’92 was terrified of the big shoes he would have to fill. Not the size nine, dusty blue sneakers that Mister Rogers always put on as he sang “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.” Something even bigger than that—Fred Rogers’ legacy. It was 2012, and Siefken, director of children’s programming at PBS, had just received a job offer from Fred Rogers Productions to head its production for a time and go on to be its next president and CEO.

The Carpenter Reading Room on the third floor of Bostock Library is an “absolute silence area” during even slow times of the semester. An overloud cough can generate a stare, an unmuted phone chime, defenestration—for at least the phone.

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

In May, students moved out of their Central Campus apartments for the last time. The buildings are now being razed, and the future of Central Campus is uncertain. Over its nearly forty-five-year lifespan as part of our university, the Central Campus apartments remained the same, but the vision for what they could be changed as the years passed.

We asked Jason DeParle ’82, a New York Times reporter and author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century, about what he learned about global migration from following a family for thirty years.

Jenny Tung ’03, Ph.D. ’10, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, is among the recipients of a 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (popularly known as the “genius grant”). Her research involves understanding how social and environmental adversity affects health and survival over the lifespan of an individual.

You were hooked on this field from your time in a freshman seminar, right? And that projected you into graduate school.

She usually sits on top of her house, or she runs around in the grass,” says Jonas Meksem. On an early fall day, the junior stopped by to visit Peaches the Calico Cat on his way to Pitchfork’s, a campus eatery. Meksem peeked inside her cat home.

No Peaches.

“I try to make visiting Peaches a part of my daily walk,” says Meksem. “It’s great because she’s everyone’s pet, and everyone gets to take care of her.”

A century ago, in the fall of 1919, America’s colleges and universities were on the cusp of their first great expansion. Prior to the First World War, fewer than 50,000 bachelor’s degrees and 1,000 doctorates were awarded annually in the U.S.; by 1930, those numbers would more than double. In 1919, the first postdoctoral fellowships in the sciences were established by the National Research Council with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation; these new programs would revolutionize research.

I was moved by the profile piece on Sandy Darity [“Sandy Darity Has Some Thoughts About Inequality,” Spring 2019].

When her phone rang last fall, France Family Professor of art, art history, and visual studies Kristine Stiles recognized the voice on the other end of the line. “Do you know who you’re talking to?” the voice asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Valerie.” Valerie Hillings ’93: student, research assistant, protégé, then friend and ultimately colleague, curator at the Guggenheim. A voice Stiles would never mistake.

Early evening. A crowd of fifty or so mills around two levels of galleries and assembly space: a modernist house filled with visitors, the living room lined with folding chairs, the kitchen island covered with wine bottles, pimento cheese dip, ham biscuits, and fruit. Framed photographs cover every wall, and people leaf through books and read gallery guides left in easy reach on shelves and windowsills.

Gummy bears. They reveal a sweet reality. Watch the video: A couple of three-year-olds are noisily negotiating a challenge cleverly arranged for them. They pull together on some ropes, thereby unsealing a big-box container and unleashing a flood of the candy treats. It doesn’t take much prodding by either partner to arrive at an equitable distribution; if one points out she’s gummy-deprived, the other will quickly correct the gummy imbalance.

Robert J. Lefkowitz, James B. Duke Professor of medicine and recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

What aspect of your current life would have most surprised your college-age self? That I became a scientist.

What’s the best thing college students can do to prepare for careers that may not even now exist? Get as rounded an education as possible. And make sure you are well-versed in computer science, whatever [your] major.

When I walk across Duke’s majestic campus, I’m sometimes lulled into thinking campus-based universities, beloved for centuries, might continue forever. Duke’s beauty and dynamism make it hard to imagine that the campus model of higher education is heading into long-term decline, to the point where a generation from now it will be the exception, not the rule.

It has been a great spring and summer in beautiful and historic Beaufort, North Carolina, my hometown. Hundreds of visitors daily have come to explore the glorious coastal ecosystem, just as they have every summer. Yet the normality is just surface. Beaufort is still recovering from Hurricane Florence, which struck the area just under a year ago. 

You might think that someone who spent twenty-one years conducting and overseeing FBI investigations would be inclined to look at the world retrospectively. A lifetime of trying to figure out what happened, after it happened, might have you constantly looking backward. An organized-crime figure is discovered dead—who did it, and why? Somebody set off explosives at the Boston Marathon—how did they do it, and where did they go?

But I know the past is only part of the story.

A couple of weeks after I graduated, my editor at the independent blog company I had interned for over my junior-year summer called to offer me a full-time gig. This was about a month after a has-been professional wrestler nearly sued the entire company out of existence.

Watashi wa watashi-tachi mo mata kõei aru Nihonjin de-aru koto wo akumade shinjite-iru mono de-arimasu.

“I am, and all of us are, glorious Japanese, and I will believe that until the end.”

Eleven years after I graduated from Duke, I completed a degree at MIT, where focusing on the future is so normal that few people at the institute question it. I was steeped in techno-futurism, in the belief that it’s often best to leave the past behind. But I’m a gardener. I dig. And I think about how living soil is made, and how plants have evolved to sustain themselves—and how, for millennia, growing food has been a political act.

I started writing seriously seven years ago, and sometime in the intervening period, I became a procrastinator. Missing a deadline is a terrible, deep pit: At first, it’s to be avoided at all costs, and then, once experienced, it’s something never to be relived. And yet, I catch myself following the same patterns, flirting with the same disasters.

I am the little girl at the end of a dirt road seldom traveled on. The curious mind who watched her grandmother weave rugs for eight hours straight, never tiring. The young soul who never understood the land she walked on was crying for help.

I was two months away from getting married to the father of my girls when the tech bubble burst, and I was laid off. I had a bull-market contract in a bear market, so my firm chose to pay my golden parachute and take the loss. I was utterly devastated. My solar plexus crumpled as if into a tight ball of aluminum foil. Despite the sizable amount of money in my bank account and imminence of the wedding of my dreams, all I could focus on was the loss. My reaction surprised me.

The future doesn’t exist.

Don’t worry. I’m not trying to scare you. This isn’t some dystopian rant about how nothing matters. It’s the opposite. When I realized my future was just an idea I manufactured in my head, it helped me take bigger swings in my life. And I’m hoping my story will help you do the same.

When I approached the Army ROTC offices in the basement of the West Duke Building in 2002, my sophomore year, I had one purpose in mind—finding a way to stay in college. 9-11 was a fresh memory, but the prospect of war seemed distant and unlikely. I wanted to secure my future, and a degree from Duke was a major part of my plan. I needed a scholarship, and the Army seemed like my best bet.

I recently walked around the Duke campus with my eighteen-year-old daughter, her many possible futures spread out before her, each one, for this flash of a moment, an equal contender in the competition for her attention.

Tonight, take a moment to gaze toward the heavens and salute the moon. After all, it was fifty years ago this month that Apollo 11 launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and Neil Armstrong took his “small step.”

And, on the team it took to pull off such a historic feat were three Duke alumnae. Parrish Nelson Hirasaki ’67, Julie Isherwood ’68, and Lindsay Robinson ’67 all worked on the Apollo program. And by their telling, they had the time of their lives doing it.

There are parties and then there are parties—the kind of gathering that gets talked about with giggles and winks in a hungover haze. Apparently, in September 2008, there was a party at the Lofts at Lakeview on Erwin Road that neither Beth (formerly DeFrancesco) Hatef J.D. ’10 nor David Hatef M.B.A. ’09 attended.

With the preponderance of available data has come a preponderance of concern about how the information is used and who possesses it. Kristian Lum M.S. ’08, Ph.D. ’10 counts herself among those concerned. And as lead statistician at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, she’s in a position to help elucidate data use.

“A lot of my work touches on the ways in which data and machine learning may not work in the way you’d like or hoped,” she says.

WE ASKED

Jane Sherron De Hart ’58, A.M. ’61, Ph.D. ’67, professor emerita of history at the University of California-Santa Barbara and author of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (Knopf), about what she learned about Justice Ginsburg from decades of research and countless interviews with her. De Hart received the graduate school’s 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award.

Ryan Bergamini discusses “community” to a degree that the combination of his face and the word has become a meme. On East Campus, he’s the senior making signs that encourage the first-years in the dorm where he’s a resident assistant to become TROUTs (Trinity Residents Organizing a Unified Trinity, with the slogan stating that “TROUTs swim together”).

Outfitted in someone else’s camouflage protective vests and helmets, preparing to walk the perimeter fence of a concrete motor-pool containment of the Third Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, a half-dozen Duke students give considerable thought to what might happen on their circuit. They’re on a simulation exercise helping the Special Forces figure out how to best get medical care and information to units as they fight, far from support.

ANIMALS AND MICROBES

Almost every advertisement for razors ever created captures the same moment. Towel around his neck, a man with morning stubble confronts his bathroom mirror. He is about to execute the manly act of shaving. But first, he locks eyes with his image.

“I don’t understand why we don’t understand grief,” says Kimberly Holmes Wiggins ’02.

It’s a frustration both immediate and ongoing for Wiggins. On April 16, 2016, her husband, Rasheed Wiggins ’99, M.B.A. ’10, was killed in a still unsolved hit-and-run crash in Orlando, Florida. That was the beginning of a new title for her—widow. The label, she says, was hard to accept, hard to even verbalize.

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.

Steve Schewel ’73, PH.D. ’82 used to carry in his wallet a picture of Terry Sanford holding a bullhorn, addressing a crowd of students who in 1970 had staged a sit-in on the traffic circle. In the wake of the Kent State shootings two days before, Schewel, then a freshman, had joined the crowd that stopped traffic to protest the war and the shootings.

Brooks Bell’s analytics firm, Brooks Bell Inc., which she founded in Raleigh in 2003, focuses on testing and optimization for companies such as Adobe, American Eagle Outfitters, American Express, AOL, and Brooks Brothers and is the first agency to focus exclusively on digital experimentation. Bell, who majored in psychology at Duke, also cofounded ThinkHouse and HQ Raleigh, two residential entrepreneurial communities in Raleigh that support the growing startup ecosystem.

Last spring, the Sanford School of Public Policy developed a new strategic vision intended to spark political engagement, broaden students’ experiences, and boost the school’s influence across the country and around the globe.

After taking professor Helen “Sunny” Ladd’s core public policy course, Aliya Pilchen ’13 was eager to sign up for another class taught by Sanford’s foremost expert in education finance. But there was one problem: Pilchen was only a junior, and the class she had her eye on was offered to graduate students.

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.”

At first the idea seemed pretty half-baked. Come back to Duke for thirty six hours, the pitch went, and let’s see what happens. But when Christopher Scoville ’05 received the invitation in the fall of 2013, he focused less on the nebulous agenda and more on who was driving it.

“When Tony says, ‘I’m starting this new thing,’ you say yes,” says Scoville.

The foothills are alive...with the sounds of creaky wooden porches, husky train whistles, and tobacco plants being scythed. These sounds are stored in the Sonic Dictionary, a digital archive of acoustics hosted by the Audiovisualities lab at Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute. It’s a kind of “Wikipedia of sound,” according to English doctoral student Mary Caton Lingold, who conceived the project.

You’re an outsider who needs to operate as a n insider in a pretty confusing setting, a setting that, for a couple of years, will impose all sorts of expectations on you. Lots of obstacles for you to stumble over. Lots of rituals and routines to sort out.

Despite a broken air-conditioner in her classroom and spending ten hours (and counting) on her feet, Laurel Burk ’13, M.A.T. ’14 is feeling pretty good about the first day of school at Durham’s Northern High School.

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…

The trigger of your senses can often prompt specific memories. For Tracy, it’s a particular piece of music that brings thoughts of the place she once called home.

Produced for The Short Audio Documentary course taught by John Biewen at the Center for Documentary Studies.

Charles Taylor ’15 presents a visual guide to his time at Duke.

Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

Produced for the Motion Design course taught by Raquel Salvatella de Prada, assistant professor of the practice of art, art history & visual studies, and arts of the moving image.

Kimberly Blackwell ’89 could have gone about anywhere to begin her career as a pioneering breast-cancer doctor. After graduating from the Mayo Medical School in 1994, she chose to come back to Duke. Now a clinical oncologist at the Duke Cancer Institute, Blackwell is regarded as one of the top breast-cancer researchers in the country.

The cashier at the Dollar General gave me a somewhat confused glance as I checked out, looking at me with a combination of perplexity and shyness. He did not quite understand what my purchase would be used for, but he also seemed too shy to ask. And so, without explanation, I paid for my item and left.

"It was a rough time for us, when they accused our boys of that heinous crime.”

We were in a midtown Manhattan hotel conference room in 2007, attendees at a Duke University Black Alumni Connection meeting, my first. I thought I had misheard the speaker, an impassioned former Duke athlete who by the end of his speech had pledged $60,000 to either DUBAC or the Reggie Howard Scholarship Fund—I no longer recall which.

But his words I never forgot.

Sitting a comfortable distance from the U.S. military conflicts abroad, I had envisioned “coming home” as both a welcome departure from the battlefield and a new beginning for returning veterans. However, my perspective shifted upon interviewing one of the subjects from my first documentary.

Here’s a slice of my personal life that will be familiar to many readers: a home-renovation project that stretched out for almost a year. Now the chaos of all that carpentry equipment has been cleared away. There are snazzy light fixtures, new floors and countertops, energy-efficient windows, built-in shelves, shiny appliances.

More than 2,000 students have participated in DukeEngage since it began in 2007. The program, in which students serve a domestic or international community in need, has become a Duke hallmark. So, it might surprise you to know that forty years before DukeEngage launched, Duke had developed an immersive community- service program based in Durham.

Kara Medoff Barnett ’00 began taking ballet classes at the age of three and entertained the idea of becoming a professional dancer before she was sidelined with an injury in high school. By the time she arrived at Duke, she had switched her sights from arts to medicine, taking pre-med courses and volunteering with the student-run Emergency Medical Services group.

Read more about these alumni who recently returned to give back to Duke students through mentoring, lectures, and words of wisdom.

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.

Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in the Duke School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, offers an analogy for perceptions of mental health. “There’s this continuum between night and day, and there’s this moment, dusk, where you can’t really tell the difference between night and day.” Dusk suggests that there is no absolute of either; that it’s a question of degree.

Is Duke good at risk-taking?

I think we’re pretty good; compared to most of our peers, we’re pretty risk-accepting. Schools like ours have not only an opportunity but almost an obligation to take risks, to experiment in our academic work.

Any university has to manage the power balance between central administration and the various units. How does that balance feel here?

In late March, newly renovated Gross Hall played host to the 2014 DataFest, a forty-eight-hour team competition in big data analytics. The event attracted close to 130 undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, including statistics, computer science, and engineering. Duke was the best represented school, but participants also made the trip from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, and even Dartmouth College.

“The rolling sand dunes and gentle waves of Emerald Isle are so picturesque that I almost forget why I am here: to conduct a necropsy on a stranded bottlenose dolphin,” wrote Samantha Emmert from the Duke Marine Lab in early 2014. Emmert spent her junior year researching an outbreak of morbillivirus epizootic, a measles-like virus that has ravaged dolphin populations along the Atlantic Coast since last summer.

THE CATALYST: In 2000, Congress passed legislation to create the Veterans History Project. Housed in the Library of Congress, the ongoing collection includes correspondence, audio narratives, and visual materials from veterans of every American war since World War I. Several years ago, Center for Documentary Studies instructor Michelle Lanier and then-visiting professor Elaine Lawless saw an opportunity to contribute to the project at duke.

Nour has fair skin and gray-blue eyes, accentuated by her ocean-colored hijab and dress. She tells us how in love she is with her husband, how he waited three years until she was old enough to marry him. She speaks of her son as the only bright spot in her life here in Jordan, the only happy moment. She details the horrors of her father-in-law’s public murder in Syria and even shows us pictures of his flowery burial on her cell phone.

One of the most joyous highlights of this past fall was the reopening of Baldwin Auditorium. Just as Duke Chapel is the focal point of West Campus, so Baldwin, with its graceful Georgian Revival dome, is the focal point of East Campus. Over the last two years, Baldwin has undergone a $15 million renovation in line with Duke’s philosophy of architectural renewal on campus: Preserve the historic exterior while creating state-of-the-art interior spaces to meet key campus needs.

An Alumni Faculty Fellow, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is Chancey Stillman Professor of practical ethics in the philosophy department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics. His current work explores moral psychology and brain science, uses of neuroscience in legal systems, and freedom and responsibility. He co-teaches a MOOC, “Think Again: How to Reason and Argue.”

Less than two-thirds of doctors and teenage patients talk about sex, sexuality, or dating during yearly checkups, according to a Duke Medicine study published in JAMA Pediatrics last December. The conversations that do occur usually last just over thirty seconds, on average.

Box scores in the National Basketball Association look far different than they did thirty years ago—or even ten, for that matter. these days, they’re canvassed in acronyms such as PER (Player efficiency rating) and 3PAr (3-Point Attempt Rate), which look more like robot names than a way to measure a basketball game.

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

Shirley Fulton J.D. ’80 and Robert Bridges Ph.D. ’79 are among the twelve individuals selected for North Carolina’s 2014 Heritage Calendar, which honors contributions to the African-American experience in the state. In conjunction with the calendar’s release, the N.C.

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?

While service to others—and one’s alma mater—is reward enough for most volunteers, the Duke Alumni Association’s awards program recognizes the contributions of alumni who have gone above and beyond. These include:

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.

This is how you mend a broken world. A war-crimes tribunal presses a genocide charge, some decades later, against the leader of the Bosnian Serbs. The president of Sudan, wanted on charges of genocide in Darfur, where violence broke out in 2003, stirs embarrassment and angst with his plan to attend the United Nations General Assembly. Bangladesh sentences a former lawmaker to death for the mass murder of Hindus during the country’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan.

On a sun-drenched Sunday afternoon in late September, the Duke women's varsity soccer team trails Virginia Tech 0-1. Seven minutes into the second half, forward Kelly Cobb '15 falls to the field clutching her right leg. Cobb is considered one of the best goal-scorers in the country; she played on the 2012 U.S. World Cup team that won the gold in Japan. But she’s also been plagued by injuries that have warranted surgery, physical therapy, and rehab.

Under a moonless sky in the North Carolina mountains, a Democratic gubernatorial candidate named Terry Sanford stood on the steps of the Henderson County courthouse and made a proposal that seemed audacious for 1960. It had been a stinking hot May day, but the night was cooling rapidly, and 350 voters had shown up to hear this former FBI agent and World War II paratrooper describe his vision.

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.

About a month before students were slated to land in Turkey last summer, the city of Istanbul erupted in a fury of protests. What began as a peaceful sit-in to oppose the demolition of Gezi Park soon morphed into large-scale demonstrations and indiscriminate police violence.

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.

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.

Phil Haus ’08 wants to pheed the world. More specifically, with Pheed—the new all-in-one text, photo, video, and audio social network—he wants to change the social-media landscape. The app, which debuted in November 2012, was dubbed “the social-media company of the year” by Business Insider.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with Blake Byrne ’57, the Alumni Distinguished Award winner for 2013. Byrne recently stepped down as chair of the advisory board of the Nasher Museum of Art.

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.

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.

Straightening Out Shooting

I read with interest “Straight Shooting” [Summer 2013]. Sadly one of Duke’s own was an early victim of gun violence in a school. Horace P. (“Buck”) Morgan ’70 dedicated his life to helping troubled youth, but lost his life in the 1990s in Georgia when he was shot by a student at school. Buck was one of the best people to ever graduate from Duke.

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.

One of my first patients as a medical intern was an avowed racist. Chester (a pseudonym) was a lifelong smoker and fan of Southern cuisine whose bad habits finally caught up with him. His body failing, he turned to our hospital for help only to find me, a black man, as one of the doctors entrusted to extend his life. The year was 2003, but for a time, it felt more like 1963.

Floating along Inle Lake in Central Burma, I lean over and run my hand through the warm water. As I do, my eyes never stop searching that one hill I came more than 10,000 miles to see. Most tourists, if they  choose to stop on the lake, will pause to take picture after picture of the fishermen, the floating villages, the temples, and the jumping cats. The engines to their boats then fire back up, and they head off, chattering away and comparing shots taken.

In Letter to a Man in the Fire, the late writer and longtime Duke professor Reynolds Price ’55 makes an eloquent case for the existence of a caring God. He pauses at one point in this extended essay, which draws on his own nearly fatal battle with cancer, to acknowledge that his sincere hope for an afterlife “would seem lunatic to many of my university and writing colleagues.”

One of the hallmarks of getting old, I'm told, is thinking that everything is getting steadily worse. I must still be young, then, because I am confident that Duke has gotten better since I was a student. I arrived at this conclusion this past May, when I returned to campus to deliver the commencement address.

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)

Sterly Wilder ’83, associate vice president for alumni affairs, talks with NBA star (and former Duke basketball standout) Grant Hill ’94, who now plays for the Los Angeles Clippers.

SW: I was your pre-major adviser, and we met the first day you were on campus. Do you remember whether I gave you a hard time?

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.

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.

Maurice Conway does not recall being particularly polite when the phone rang that first evening, and he had every right not to be. He was fifty-seven years old and retired because of a bad heart that had required doctors to splice veins around the clogged spots in his arteries, and he’d given up cigarette only five months earlier, which will make any man irritable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ingrid Daubechies’ eyes dart down at her plate of mixed salad greens. She stabs a hefty chunk of endive hiding beneath an arugula leaf and chews it quickly. The words are coming fast now.

“We don’t get a three-dimensional map,” she says. “We have a much higherdimensional map. More like eighty. But I can only explain it in three dimensions.”

On Good Friday in 2009, Mary Ann Harrison made a phone call that changed her life.

Fifty years ago this fall, a black third-grader sat in the balcony of a Charlotte movie theater, segregated from the white children seeing the same movie, accepting as normal that his skin color meant he and his friends drank from separate water fountains, used separate bathrooms, rode at the back of the bus.

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.”

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:

For millennia, African lions ruled a seemingly boundless kingdom, a sprawling, unbroken stretch of savannah onethird larger than the continental U.S. But today, 75 percent of that vast savannah is gone, and humans are fast chipping away at what remains. And Stuart Pimm is worried.

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.

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.

It was seventy degrees outside, and my hands were completely numb. I was leaning belly-first against a steep, 13,000-foot mountain slope in Colorado’s Gore Range. The slope was covered with a frigid rind of snow, and my feet were carefully positioned in tiny, kicked-in toeholds.

Kendall Bradley ’11 checked her phone and gave herself thirty-five minutes to fall apart. She’d left Nick in the gaping mouth of an MRA machine, his eyes full of pain and fear, and was finally alone. Or, at least, as alone as one could be in the ghastly circus of the hospital triage room, which teemed with people in various states of agony. Somewhere on the streets of Ho Chi Minh there had been an accident, and victims were being carried in in shocking states of disfigurement.

On the first day of his marine conservation course this past January, Martin Smith told his eight undergraduates that they would play a game. One student would wait in the hallway. The other seven would stand around a conference table and go fishing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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."

Paula Ehrlich ’84 may be the only foundation leader whose expertise includes environmental planning, equine surgery, bone physiology, corporate and academic research, and preclinical translational drug discovery and development.

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.

The skeptics are cordoned off by white drapes at the north end of Milk Studios in Manhattan, while the targets of their awe and ire, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, scramble to prep their latest, super-secret tech venture for its unveiling. The details surrounding Airtime, Sean and Shawn’s first joint effort since Napster, have been sealed in silence, and though dozens of leading tech journalists were invited to Milk today for the launch, Airtime is rumored to be unnervingly glitchy.

By ten minutes to seven, Fuqua’s Geneen Auditorium buzzes with preparation. Organizers shoo away early comers while the tech crew repeatedly tests the video feed and microphones, consulting over headsets. Each of the 450 seats has a program on it; many also sport a Thunderstick, a hollow tube for claquers to pound on or hoot through. The crowd will be big—and noisy. Welcome to the 13th Annual Duke Start-Up Challenge Grand Finale.

When Mac Jordan stepped onto Duke’s campus in 1979, he was one of the few freshmen to come with red dirt flowing through his veins. Growing up in Saxapahaw, a mill village on the Haw River in North Carolina’s Alamance County, he and his siblings spent their days climbing trees in the shady woods and catching salamanders by the creeks that feed the Haw. “The river, the forests, the fields, the farms, the creeks, that’s where I was,” recalls Jordan ’83.

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.

In the summer of 2010, Nyuol Tong ’14 returned to his home village of Ayeit in what is now South Sudan for the first time since he was five years old. He saw the remnants of war. Destroyed houses. Scorched land. Scarred people. Scarce jobs. A young population. And no schools. “Not even a single school,” Tong says. “That was a horrifying fact.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Jimmy Soni is having a bit of a thrill ride. Then again, Jimmy Soni has had a lot of thrill rides. The twenty-six-year-old alumnus was recently named the new managing editor of The Huffington Post, and he couldn’t have done it without Duke.

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.

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

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.

New app can sniff out doctored files.

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