DukeMed Alumni News

Donald McDonnell, PhD is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Faculty Award.

It’s not particularly unusual for biomedical scientists to move from academia into the pharmaceutical industry. Donald McDonnell took the opposite route: before joining the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine, he worked for a number of years for the biopharmaceutical company Ligand Pharmaceuticals in California. This early exposure to pharma and drug development played a major role in his highly successful academic career.

Mark Humayun, MD’89, HS’90-’93 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumnus Award. He is an internationally known pioneer in vision restoration who has literally allowed the blind to see. He is a retinal surgeon, engineer, scientist, and innovator whose accomplishments have been so distinguished in his field that he is the only ophthalmologist elected to both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.

Arthur Palumbo is the 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Honorary Alumnus Award. He is among the most dedicated friends of Duke University School of Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics. His philanthropic support for the school’s students and faculty has touched the lives of thousands of patients.

When it was time for Tai-Po Tschang, MD’72, to decide where to go to medical school, the choice could hardly have been easier. Duke, in fact, made it for him.

“I applied to nine medical schools, and Duke was the only one that accepted me,” says Tschang. “I didn’t have any other choice. The others turned me down because I only had three years of college, but at Duke that was the requirement, as long as you had all the prerequisites. I was very happy they took me.”

Caroline Philpott, AB’83, MD’87 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumna Award. She is one of the most respected international leaders in the biochemistry and cell biology of iron metabolism. She has made groundbreaking discoveries in iron metabolism that deciphered the human intracellular iron trafficking mechanism.

Welcome to the Revolution.

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.

Michael Freemark, MD'76 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Faculty Award. He is an internationally known pediatric endocrinologist who has made seminal discoveries in fields including obesity and childhood malnutrition, pediatric diabetes, intermediary metabolism, and the control of fetal growth. His basic science work has focused on the regulation of metabolism during pregnancy and its effects on fetal development. In clinical research, he has played a leading role in the field of pediatric nutrition.

With sepsis, time is of the essence. Left untreated, the illness—a runaway immune response to infection—can quickly become life-threatening. Hours, and even minutes, can mean the difference between life and death for this condition, which strikes more than 1.5 million people and kills more than 250,000 Americans each year.

Because sepsis is nonspecific, there is no single definitive sign, symptom, or test that identifies a patient as having it. That’s a huge challenge for providers, who need to assess patients as quickly as possible.

William Stead, AB’70, MD’74, HS’73-’77 is a 2019 recipient of Duke Medical Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumnus Award. He is a pioneer in the application of communication and information technology to improve the practice of medicine. He is considered a founder of the field of biomedical informatics and a contemporary thought leader.

Remembering a Member of the Greatest Generation

Robert Malone Rosemond (1924-2018), Class of 1953

Every summer Robert (Crusty) Malone Rosemond, AB’49, MD’53, HS’53, P’82, P’86, P’86 would take his friends to an isolated fishing camp in the wilderness of Northern Ontario, Canada. Among them were Ralph Snyderman, MD, former chancellor for health affairs, and Bucky Waters, former Duke men’s basketball coach and vice chancellor for alumni affairs and development at Duke Medical Center.