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Two members of the Duke community have been inducted as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest learned societies and independent policy research centers. This year’s class of 147 new inductees included A. Eugene Washington, M.D., chancellor for health affairs at Duke University, and Marc G. Caron, Ph.D., James B. Duke Professor in the Department of Cell Biology.

 

Healthcare facilities continue to battle drug-resistant organisms such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) that loiter on surfaces even after patient rooms have been cleaned and can cause new, sometimes-deadly infections.

MMCi is a one-year program that began in 2009 within Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Three years ago, the program moved to the School of Medicine, and is partially supported with Duke CTSA funds. The program combines the business knowledge of an MBA with the technical knowledge of an informatics degree, with an intense focus on how both affect the world of medicine.

Eda Yildirim, PhD, a new faculty member in the medical school’s department of cell biology, is among a growing movement of Duke scientists trying to understand how genes are silenced or activated in both health and disease. DNA still gets the most press, but what Yildirim finds more interesting is the RNA molecules that interact with DNA in myriad ways to control its operations.

Students from the Durham Nativity School recently participated in a unique, hands-on surgical skills workshop as part of a new educational outreach program from the Duke University Department of Surgery in the School of Medicine.

Students, faculty, staff and alumni of the Duke Physician Assistant Program celebrated the program’s 50th anniversary in October, marking the milestone of being the first physician assistant (PA) program in the nation and the birthplace of the PA profession.

Duke Medicine has launched the first hand transplant program in North Carolina, becoming one of a small number of transplant centers in the country to offer the life-altering procedure.

A unique molecule developed at Duke Medicine, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and MacroGenics, Inc., is able to bind HIV-infected cells to the immune system’s killer T cells. It could become a key part of a shock-and-kill strategy being developed in the hope of one day clearing HIV infection.

  Scientists at Duke University have released a highly detailed model of connections in the mouse brain that could provide generations of neuroscientists new insights into brain circuits and origins of mental illness, such as depression and schizophrenia. The findings are published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.