Caroline Philpott, AB’83, MD’87 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumna Award. She is one of the most respected international leaders in the biochemistry and cell biology of iron metabolism. She has made groundbreaking discoveries in iron metabolism that deciphered the human intracellular iron trafficking mechanism.

First came steam power, then electric power, and then the information age. Now, according to the World Economic Forum, we’re entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as the sciences converge around digitized information and data in ways that disrupt nearly every field in every country.

Donald McDonnell, PhD is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Faculty Award.

It’s not particularly unusual for biomedical scientists to move from academia into the pharmaceutical industry. Donald McDonnell took the opposite route: before joining the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine, he worked for a number of years for the biopharmaceutical company Ligand Pharmaceuticals in California. This early exposure to pharma and drug development played a major role in his highly successful academic career.

With sepsis, time is of the essence. Left untreated, the illness—a runaway immune response to infection—can quickly become life-threatening. Hours, and even minutes, can mean the difference between life and death for this condition, which strikes more than 1.5 million people and kills more than 250,000 Americans each year.

Because sepsis is nonspecific, there is no single definitive sign, symptom, or test that identifies a patient as having it. That’s a huge challenge for providers, who need to assess patients as quickly as possible.

William Stead, AB’70, MD’74, HS’73-’77 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumnus Award. He is a pioneer in the application of communication and information technology to improve the practice of medicine. He is considered a founder of the field of biomedical informatics and a contemporary thought leader.

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On Friday, March 15th, medical students at Duke opened their envelopes and learned where in the country they will complete their residency programs.

A total of 117 students participated in Match Day at Duke this year and are headed to some of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs.

Among them:

Every summer Robert (Crusty) Malone Rosemond, AB’49, MD’53, HS’53, P’82, P’86, P’86 would take his friends to an isolated fishing camp in the wilderness of Northern Ontario, Canada. Among them were Ralph Snyderman, MD, former chancellor for health affairs, and Bucky Waters, former Duke men’s basketball coach and vice chancellor for alumni affairs and development at Duke Medical Center. 

The first time Shree Bose saw a live beating human heart, it took her breath away.

She was on a surgery rotation, one of the clinical rotations that Duke medical students complete during their second year. Just a short while earlier, the patient had spoken with the medical team, expressing anxieties about the surgery. Now, with a few strokes of the surgeon’s scalpel, Bose could see the patient’s heart. It was a little mind-boggling.

In the 1950s, Kimberly Johnson’s maternal grandmother was diagnosed with metastatic cervical cancer and ultimately lost her life to the disease. Since then, her family has always wondered whether the situation might have had a different outcome if her grandmother had had access to today’s health care.

“We talk about how things are different now, and if she’d lived today she might have lived longer and better, especially if she had good insurance and a good income,” says Johnson, MD, MHS, associate professor of medicine.

Each year, fourth-year medical students across the country view the third week of March as the beginning of their careers in medicine. Match Day, created in 1952, is a event organized by the National Resident Match Program during which students in the United States are "matched" with residency and fellowship training programs throughout the country.

 

 

[video:https://youtu.be/s8Mht6-GBIs]