In a pandemic world, everything looks a little different. As of June 1, James Roberts is the new Duke econ chair. I spoke to him by phone while he was making lunch for his kids. “Like everyone else these days I'm just trying to do it all. I just realized that the bagel I told my daughter she could have for lunch doesn't exist,” he laughed. Even though working from home is the new normal, Roberts is still excited to take on the challenges that come with being department chair. A Chicago native who moved to Charlotte… read more » about For New Econ Chair, Challenges are Why He Took the Job
Mark Goodacre is a big fan of Doctor Who—maybe even an obsessive fan. The kind of fan who has friends who host their own Doctor Who podcasts. When they started, Goodacre probably couldn’t have told you they would inspire him to offer his New Testament scholarship in a new medium. Not only is that just what happened, but the experience led down even stranger roads, like an investigation into the history of a joke about dentures and an email explaining that his voice was a cure for anxiety. Goodacre, the Frances Hill… read more » about A Comforting Voice on the New Testament
Cynthia Rudin, Professor of Computer Science, argues that we can only fight pandemics like COVID-19 by making non-identifiable patient data freely accessible. Read more at the Washington Post. read more » about No More Excuses. Make Data More Accessible.
Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies, joined PBS NewsHour to discuss the history and significance of Juneteenth. Watch the video at the PBS website. read more » about What Is Juneteenth?
Against a backdrop of dual crises of public health and racial justice, more than 50 Black faculty, staff and students shared personal stories of racism and discrimination, presented research on racial inequities, and issued urgent calls for change. The day-long symposium, Living While Black, was attended by more than 6,300 members of the Duke community via videoconference. It addressed the national crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is disproportionately affecting communities of color, and the spate of police… read more » about Living While Black: Raw Discussions on Race at Duke and in America
By the time Summer Session I started on May 13, Duke’s educators had already been at work for weeks. Before a class can be taught, it must be planned. There are readings to select, assignments to create, questions to prepare, schedules to set. And this year, there was an additional challenge: the professors, instructors and Ph.D. students tasked with teaching undergraduates had to adapt their classes for a completely remote term, thanks to the impacts of COVID-19. There was also more demand than ever. With stay-at-home… read more » about 3 Summer Courses Show What Goes Into Planning a Duke Class
Duke University researchers have developed an AI tool that can turn blurry, unrecognizable pictures of people’s faces into eerily convincing computer-generated portraits, in finer detail than ever before. Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, ‘imagining’ features such as fine lines, eyelashes and stubble that weren’t there in the first… read more » about Artificial Intelligence Makes Blurry Faces Look More Than 60 Times Sharper
Lithuanian pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute will be joining Duke Music as Associate Professor of the Practice in July 2020. Jokubaviciute comes to Duke from the Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, VA, where she has served on the faculty since 2015. She is also on the faculty at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music School and Festival in Blue Hill, ME and is a mentoring artist at the Marlboro Music Festival in Marlboro, VT. Called “an artist of commanding technique, refined temperament and persuasive insight” by … read more » about Pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute Joins the Duke Music Faculty
In a lunch-hour conversation on Friday, June 5, the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ signature series, The Ethics of Now from Home broke from its weekly webinar schedule to quickly respond to George Floyd’s murder, racism, police violence, and public demonstrations happening all across the nation. In the conversation, “Racism, Police Violence, and Protests,” series host Adriane Lentz-Smith (Associate Professor of History), was joined by William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr. (Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public… read more » about Racism, Police Violence, and Protests
Peter Feaver, Professor of Political Science, argues that it was a mistake for President Trump to call for the military to put down protests. Read the article at Foreign Policy. read more » about The Stakes Are High, and We Must Be Better Than This
Laura Edwards, Peabody Family Distinguished Professor of History, argues that protesters have a right to oversight on police powers, and that the right has deep roots in Anglo-American law. Read her article at the Washington Post. read more » about The Constitution Demands Police Accountability
John Brown, director of the Duke University Jazz Program and professor of the practice of music, has been named vice provost for the arts, Duke University Provost Sally Kornbluth announced today. Brown will be Duke’s first fulltime vice provost for the arts, demonstrating the university’s commitment to the arts, and building on the work led by his predecessor Scott Lindroth, who has held the position since 2007. In 2019, an arts planning group convened by Duke University President Vincent E. Price recommended the position… read more » about John Brown Named Vice Provost for the Arts
Broad criminal justice reform is needed to change policing in the United States, and it should originate at the local level, Duke scholars said Thursday. Three Duke experts spoke to media Thursday about a variety of policy and reform issues as well as about what can be learned about policing at the nation’s founding. Here are excerpts: ON POLICING, DEADLY FORCE AND REFORM Brandon Garrett, law professor “Police in America have incredibly broad discretion to use deadly force. About 1,000… read more » about Reimagining the Criminal Justice System
The herculean efforts to re-start Duke’s campus and medical school research laboratories are nearly complete. Thousands of lab workers, kept from their benches and equipment for months by the COVID pandemic, are shaking off the cobwebs and getting back to work generating data. But with some significant differences. “I think it'll take me a few weeks to actually get back into the rhythm,” said Tatiana Segura, a professor of biomedical engineering who has a large team in two laboratory spaces in Fitzpatrick-… read more » about Duke’s Labs Are Back in Business, But In a New Way
Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African American Studies, joined WRAL to discuss protests against police violence and systemic racism. Watch the video at WRAL. read more » about Duke Professor Discusses Protests, Police and What Happens Next
Sarah Gaither, Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, explains the science behind how dogs help us cope. Read more at Psychology Today. read more » about I Got a Pandemic Dog That Also Helps Me Process Racism
Hundreds of published studies over the last decade have claimed it's possible to predict an individual’s patterns of thoughts and feelings by scanning their brain in an MRI machine as they perform some mental tasks. But a new analysis by some of the researchers who have done the most work in this area finds that those measurements are highly suspect when it comes to drawing conclusions about any individual person’s brain. Watching the brain through a functional MRI machine (fMRI) is still great for finding the general brain… read more » about Studies of Brain Activity Aren’t as Useful as Scientists Thought
Even with seemingly convincing video evidence, prosecutors may struggle to convict a former Minnesota police officer charged with the third-degree murder of a man he was restraining, a Duke law scholar said Tuesday. Duke law professor James Coleman Jr. said the case against Derek Chauvin may come down to a jury’s interpretation of precisely what caused the death of George Floyd, who Chauvin restrained with a knee hold for nearly nine minutes. Chauvin is white, Floyd was black, and the incident led to mass race protests in… read more » about Duke Scholars Examine Protests and Police Conduct
Coronavirus may have shut down campuses and closed labs, but that hasn’t stopped some Duke students from brainstorming ways to improve COVID-19 testing while working from home -- with help from artificial intelligence. A student-led team is building a machine learning system that could help doctors analyze CT scans of people’s lungs and diagnose COVID-19 more quickly and accurately than nasal swab tests. Their system is able to distinguish COVID-19 from other common infections, such as pneumonia. And unlike many AI… read more » about Duke Students Taught a Computer to Detect COVID-19 in Lung Scans
If you asked Theater Studies instructor Talya Klein in March how she and her students in “Acting for the Camera” were adjusting to remote learning, Klein would have admitted to a lofty goal. She hoped to have a feature film completed as a final project to an anomalous semester. “We’ll see,” she said. “I don’t know what May will bring, where we’ll be, or what the film will look like—but we have to try.” While the Duke community finished spring semester from home and celebrated graduates by Marking the Moment, Klein’s… read more » about Filmmaking and Social Distancing: When "Going Viral" is a Good Thing
Most often, when graduate students talk about “the academic job market,” what we really mean is the “U.S. academic job market.” But what about the academic job market in the United Kingdom or the countries of the European Union? What challenges and opportunities might be encountered by a Duke Ph.D. looking for a career on the other side of the Atlantic? With generous support from The Graduate School’s Professional Development Grant, Romance Studies Ph.D. candidates Anna Tybinko and Elia Romera-Figueroa… read more » about Discovering Possibilities for a Mobile, Multi-Lingual Academic Career
Every morning, Duke Biology staff, faculty and students receive a pick-me-up from Randy Smith. Smith, departmental manager for Biology, has been sending a daily email to everyone in the department that includes updates on labs and on mask and glove donations and tips for working from home. “My role has become a cross between a cheerleader and an air traffic controller,” Smith said. “Biology is pretty tight community. It’s important to me that we maintain that while we're all separated." Smith began preparing the… read more » about Dedicated Devils: Randy Smith
COVID-19 is bringing new scientific, behavioral and cultural challenges every day. The DIBS Faculty Network consists of 200 interdisciplinary neuroscience researchers from across Duke’s Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Law; Pratt School of Engineering, Fuqua School of Business, and Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. Their research can help us understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is influencing people’s decision-making, behavior, choices, and physical and mental health. The following faculty interviews… read more » about COVID-19: A Neuroscience Perspective
The full version of this article is available at DukeStories. Scott Lindroth’s 13-year tenure as Duke’s first vice provost for the arts will soon conclude, which means the classically trained composer will have more time to bang on motorcycle engine cooling fins and other scrap metals to see what sounds they make. Yes, you read that right. A Duke faculty member for 30 years now, Lindroth has long had unusual and undefined musical ideas bouncing around in his head and little time to extract them. When… read more » about A Career in the Arts
When a professional journal in your field dedicates an entire issue to reviewing your life’s work, you have a unique opportunity to look back on your career. “I can’t believe I’m as old as I am,” said David Beratan, who recently had that experience when the Journal of Physical Chemistry B published a special issue in honor of his 60th birthday. “It’s a privilege, an honor. It’s flattering and a little bit embarrassing.” Of course, not everyone gets this treatment, however long their careers. Beratan, the R.J.… read more » about David Beratan Reflects on the Humans Behind the Science
Emily Derbyshire wants to help people—and she wants to do it at scale. Derbyshire became a professor because she felt the university setting offered opportunities she wouldn’t get elsewhere: pursuing research on diseases that drug companies wouldn’t fund and mentoring a diverse group of future chemists to expand access to the field. In April, the assistant professor of Chemistry was named a 2020 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar in recognition for her work on both fronts. “I definitely felt honored and humbled,” Derbyshire… read more » about Fighting Malaria in the Classroom and the Lab
DURHAM, N.C. -- Electrolysis, passing a current through water to break it into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen, could be a handy way to store excess energy from wind or solar power. The hydrogen can be stored and used as fuel later, when the sun is down or the winds are calm. Unfortunately, without some kind of affordable energy storage like this, billions of watts of renewable energy are wasted each year. For hydrogen to be the solution to the storage problem, water-splitting electrolysis would have to be much more affordable… read more » about Flow-Through Electrodes Make Hydrogen 50 Times Faster
Merlise Clyde and Jerome Reiter, both professors of Statistical Science, have been named 2020 Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Fellows. Founded in 1935, IMS is a member organization devoted to “fostering the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability.” Fellows are selected on the basis of the contributions to the field, as assessed by a committee of their peers. Approximately 12 percent of the 3,500 active IMS members have earned the status of fellowship. The 2020… read more » about Two Duke Professors Named Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellows
Our colleague and friend Karen Neander has died after a long and valiant struggle with cancer. During her fourteen years at Duke, Karen served as the essential connecting thread between the famous philosophy of biology group here and the influential philosophy of mind and cognitive science group. She contributed extensively to both fields, and to their intersection, throughout her long and storied career. In her work and academic life, she presented a rare combination of philosophical rigor and wry wit. During her years… read more » about Duke Flags Lowered: Philosophy Professor Karen Neander Dies
Much like people, fruit flies must decide when the time and place are right to make a move on a mate. Male fruit flies use cues such as age and pheromones to gauge their chances of success, but just how they do that on a molecular level was a mystery. New research suggests that the answer lies, in part, in their DNA. A new study finds that the scent of other flies, coupled with signals from a male’s internal hormones, alter the activity of a gene that controls how turned on he is by pheromones when he reaches maturity. A… read more » about How a Male Fly Knows When to Make a Move on a Mate