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Svati Shah, MD, MHS, has been named Associate Dean of Genomics and Director of the Duke Precision Genomics Collaboratory. The collaboratory is a new coordinating center that will serve as the nexus for genetics and genomics activities in the School of Medicine. As director, Dr. Shah will coordinate efforts among institutes, centers and departments in all areas of genetics and genomics, ranging from fundamental basic science to clinical genomics and precision medicine.

Joanna Downer, PhD, Associate Dean for Research Development in the School of Medicine, has been elected to the Board of Directors of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP). Formed in 2010, NORDP is dedicated to building and supporting a community of research development professionals whose work advances, strengthens, and grows their institutions’ research enterprise. Dr. Downer’s term is effective now and will end in 2023. She has been a member of NORDP since 2010 and has served as co-chair of the Professional Development Committee since 2016. 

Diet fads that influence consumers to deprive their bodies of certain foods, such as the Atkins low-carb diet program, have been around for decades.

Gabriela A. Nagy, Caitlin M. Fang, Alexander J. Hish, Lisalynn Kelly, Christopher V. Nicchitta, Kafui Dzirasa, and M. Zachary Rosenthal

For Andrew “Tip” Taylor, MD’68, the proverbial fountain of youth isn’t a fountain at all, but a river. Actually, lots of rivers. For more than 40 years, Taylor—a renowned nuclear medicine physician and ambitious outdoor adventurer—and his friend Jim Slinger have connected for a yearly 3-to-4-week canoe and backpacking trip in northern Alaska and Canada. It’s not a casual undertaking: a bush plane deposits them in the remote wilderness, and until it returns to fetch them weeks later, they’re on their own in the wild, making their way through grizzly bear country.

Noted autism researcher to lead university interdisciplinary institute Geri Dawson, a leading researcher of autism spectrum disorders, has been named director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS), Provost Sally Kornbluth and School of Medicine Dean Mary Klotman announced this week.

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.

New Program Gets Medical Students Off Campus and into the Community Maya Torain first stepped onto the Duke campus as a medical school student two years ago, but she was no stranger to Durham. As a child, the Baltimore, Maryland, native spent her summers in Durham visiting her father’s family. Years later, even though she was attending medical school right in her father’s hometown, she says she felt as though she were in a bubble, far removed from the town she remembered. She was eager to get out and serve the local community.

Growing up in Scotland, Gavin Maitland was intrigued by the 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz, in which Clint Eastwood’s character breaks out of the notorious prison and eludes capture by making his way through the dangerous waters of San Francisco Bay. One day many years later, Maitland slipped into the same cold waters off Alcatraz and began swimming toward a very different sort of freedom. Accompanied by his son, Zander, 13, and his daughter, Riley, 11, he swam from Alcatraz to the San Francisco shore in 2013 to celebrate his escape from the lung disease that had once sentenced him to a probable early death. The choppy water did not deter him from rejoicing the fifth anniversary of the lung transplant that saved his life.

Richard Schatz, MD’77, was in California, just days away from returning to New York to begin his senior year as an undergraduate at the State University at Buffalo, when the phone rang and changed everything. “It was Duke,” says Schatz, who is now research director of cardiovascular interventions in the Heart, Lung, and Vascular Center and director of cell therapy at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. “They said, ‘You’re on the wait list for medical school, and a spot just opened up. You have to be here in three days.’”