DukeMed Alumni News

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.

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.

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.

On Friday, March 20, medical students at Duke celebrated Match Day virtually! The students received envelopes digitally at noon and quickly shared their exciting news on social media and other digital platforms. A total of 115 Duke Med students participated and are headed to some of the nation’s most prestigious residency programs.

Kind and supportive classmates. Inspiring mentors. Life-changing interactions with patients. These are all facets of the Duke University medical school experience that graduating students will take with them when they move to their residency programs later this year.

A longtime advocate for the marriage of technology and data to advance health care, Amy Abernethy, MD’94, HS’94-’01, PhD, envisions a future in which the two are as ubiquitous and easy to use in the medical field as tongue depressors.

As the newly appointed principal deputy commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—the highest position at the FDA that is not a political appointment—Abernethy has a national platform in which to help advance personalized medicine.

From the day she took office as dean of Duke University School of Medicine in 2017, Mary E. Klotman, BS’76, MD’80, HS’80-’85, has advanced the idea of One Duke: the premise that the key to achieving great things lies in collaborations across Duke, regardless of title, unit, discipline, or any of the other labels that traditionally have compartmentalized the operations of a major academic medical institution.

The day her eyelashes froze together turned out to be a pivotal day for Heather Whitson, MD, HS’01-’04, ‘06. She was a medical school student at Cornell University at the time, spending the winter in Boston doing research with a Harvard geriatrician. She was enjoying the research so much she was hoping to do her residency at Harvard so she could continue it. But when her eyelashes froze, she started dreaming of warmer climes.

More than 10 million people worldwide—about 1 percent of people over age 60—live with Parkinson’s disease. There are treatments that can help control symptoms, but there is no cure.

Living with a rare disease is a challenging journey for patients and their families. These diseases are frequently hard to diagnose, can be life threatening, and often have no cure. And rare diseases are more common than you might think. The National Institutes of Health estimates that there are 7,000 rare diseases that affect from 25 to 30 million people in the United States today.