For a guy who spends his time studying climate change, facing down the future of an Earth warming at an astonishing rate, under the management of a population that commonly resists even admitting its problems, Drew Shindell seems surprisingly optimistic.

Shindell, Nicholas Professor of earth science, has drawn recent attention as a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C,” released this past fall. The report addressed the terrifying climate challenge humanity faces as it moves into an uncertain future.

Nearly 4,200 members of the more than forty species of prosimians—lemurs, lorises, bush babies, and tarsiers—have lived at the Duke Lemur Center since 1966, and the center has been recording data on them. Much of that information was in handwritten logbooks until 2012, when DLC primatologist Sarah Zehr worked with software developers to create a historical record and a living database that includes information like body mass at multiple ages, ancestry, reproduction, longevity, and mortality, as well as a bank of blood, DNA, urine, skin, and organ-tissue samples.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, at the age of thirty-five, I did not see my life pass before my eyes. I did not have black spots at the edge of my vision. Instead, I thought, “Oh, crap, what do I do now?”

“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.