DukeMed Alumni News

A Long Struggle

Eric Dziuban, MD’07, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s country director for the southwest African nation of Namibia, was enjoying a weekend at the coast with his family when the call came. A Romanian couple who had recently arrived in the Namibian capital of Windhoek from Spain had fallen ill. Tests confirmed everyone’s fear: COVID-19 had finally come to Namibia.

Growing up on a large farm near Toccoa, Georgia, Winnifred Allen “Al” Addison, AB’56, MD’60, HS’60-’65, HS’71-’72, P’83, GP’14, GP’18, was interested in anatomy from a very early age. He dissected a stillborn calf at his farm when he was just 13 years old. “I wanted to see what the inside of an animal looked like,” says Addison, the Walter L. Thomas Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

In 2015, Spencer and his wife, Ann Spencer, P’89, P’89, P’89,’93, made a bequest commitment to establish the Dr. and Mrs. William H. Spencer III Fellow in Cardiology Fund. When realized, the gift will support a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of Cardiology at Duke University School of Medicine.

Biochemist Irwin Fridovich, the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Medicine and a familiar figure on the Duke campus for more than 60 years, died on November 2, 2019, at the age of 90. Fridovich was internationally known for his work on the body’s responses to “free radicals,” dangerously corrosive oxygen molecules that would cause serious damage to tissues if left unchecked.

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.