Since launching its Moments to Movement initiative in June 2020, Duke University School of Medicine has begun work to better understand the root causes and harms of racism and to develop strategies to reduce racial inequity.

Humans are born with all the nerve cells they will ever have, and in each of those nerve cells live about two million mitochondria. As mitochondria age or become dysfunctional, the cell systematically removes them and replaces them with newer models. Neurobiologist Chantell Evans, PhD, wants to know more about this complex process.

Emily Wang, MD’03, spent her first two years at Duke University School of Medicine planning to specialize in HIV treatment and research. But during her third year, she couldn’t stop thinking about conversations she had had with a friend who had worked in prison education while an undergraduate at Harvard.

Zhao Zhang, PhD — ZZ to just about everyone — is a bit of a scientific outlier. While most of his bioscience colleagues around the world are studying the 23,000 protein-coding genes that make us human, the assistant professor of pharmacology and cancer biology is looking at the other part of the genome and asking what it does.

Duke launches an ambitious new effort to elevate and sustain excellence in science and technology.

In a lot of ways, Susan Blackwell (Crawford), MHS, PA-C’89, and the physician assistant profession have grown up together. They were born at roughly the same time, matured in parallel and proximity, and for more than three decades they’ve been inextricably linked.

Think of the inner circuitry of the brain as a traffic network. When nerve cells release a signal, the information speeds along various routes to its destination: another nerve cell elsewhere in the brain. Neurobiologist Josh Huang, PhD, is especially interested in a particular type of inhibitory nerve cells called chandelier cells.

The stress and isolation of the pandemic may have a lasting toll on some children, but Duke experts say most will recover fully — and some might even emerge with new strengths.

The human placenta performs a delicate balancing act: it must let beneficial nutrients pass from the mother to the developing fetus, but block harmful pathogens from making the same trip. Carolyn Coyne, PhD, investigates how the placenta has evolved to be such a fantastic protector but can also be vulnerable to pathogens.

Nick Heaton, PhD, is interested in the little things. Microscopic, in fact. The assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology joined Duke in 2015 to investigate RNA respiratory viruses, primarily influenza.