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After a national search, Adrian Hernandez, MD, MHS, has been named Vice Dean and the new Executive Director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), effective May 15. 

The research of Gabriela Nagy, PhD, focuses on the mental health needs of Latinx immigrants. In this interview, we talk to her about her many responsibilities at Duke and the impact the epidemic is having on the Latinx population.

It’s an early November morning and third-year Duke medical students Amanda Farrell, MSIII, and Thao Nguyen, AB’16, MSIII, are walking through the massive, muddy, and malodorous Ha Vi live bird market near Hanoi, Vietnam, looking for potential disease. They have come to the right place.

When Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH, is in the operating room performing surgery on a patient with breast cancer, she focuses all of her considerable experience, skill, and knowledge on the task at hand: giving this individual patient the best possible outcome. At the same time, she recognizes that every operation is an opportunity to learn just a little bit more about the disease she battles every day. Every patient and every procedure add to the store of knowledge that guides research and ultimately informs the advances that improve care.

Debara L. Tucci is a national expert on the causes, impact, and treatment of hearing impairment and loss. She is director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Prior to going to NIH in 2019, she was on faculty in the Department of Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine for 26 years.

As part of a massive national effort to improve and modernize flu shots, the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) received three research contracts from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), with an initial award of approximately $29.6 million in first-year funding.  The contracts are part of an ambitious initiative under NIAID aimed at developing a longer-lasting, more broadly protective vaccine to replace the seasonal flu shot. Current flu vaccines do not protect against all varieties of the virus and require new formulations each year.

Amy Arundale, DPT’11, has spent virtually her entire life involved in soccer: as a player, coach, trainer, biomechanical researcher, and clinical physical therapist.  So it was a bit of an adjustment when she was hired in the spring of 2018 as a physical therapist and biomechanist for the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. Basketball and soccer involve different sorts of movements on different surfaces, for one thing, and that has implications for injury risks.

The Silence of the Lambs, the 1991 award-winning movie in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays Hannibal Lecter, a sociopathic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer, is considered one of the great films. But for Mark S. Komrad, MD’83, a clinical psychiatrist and medical ethicist, it was more than a horror movie. It was a reflection of how the public perceives psychiatry, and a reminder of why he hesitated to go into the field in the first place.

The arrival and rapid spread of COVID-19 in mid-March disrupted virtually all normal operations at Duke. Administrators, faculty, students, and staff had to move quickly to revise plans, adapt procedures, move operations, and improvise on the fly.