DukeMed Alumni News

As an Air Force surgeon stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, during the height of the Vietnam War, Robert Green, AB’56, MD’60, saw a lot of badly injured servicemen cross his operating table. But one of them in particular stuck with him, a wounded young pilot whose journey from the skies over North Vietnam to Dayton was especially remarkable.

When Wilburt C. Davison, MD, the founding dean of Duke University School of Medicine, was looking for a candidate to serve as the school’s inaugural chair of the Department of Medicine, the first name that came to mind was that of Frederic M. Hanes, MD.

C. Keith Ozaki, AB’84, MD’88, majored in political science as an undergraduate at Duke, but he soon found himself drawn toward the life sciences. “I felt like we were studying the real world, as opposed to the man-made world of politics and policy,” says Ozaki, the John A. Mannick Professor of Surgery and vice-chair of the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. “Pretty early on, I decided I wanted to explore science and medicine.”

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.

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.

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.