Magnify Magazine | Duke University School of Medicine

portrait of woman standing infront of mural

Dissecting Disparities in Cancer Outcomes

December 1, 2021 By Angela Spivey

When Tomi Akinyemiju, PhD, came from Nigeria to the United States — Michigan, to be precise — for college in 2001, the first thing she realized was that she had drastically underestimated the cold. “It was the first snowstorm of the winter,” she said. “I arrived in Michigan wearing a cute little hoodie, thinking I was all bundled up.” Her brother, who had been living in the state for a while, brought her a winter jacket.

Duke Cardiology fellow rounds with other team members in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at the Duke Medical Pavilion

Getting to the Heart of Inclusion

When Jennifer Rymer, MD, entered cardiology fellowship training at Duke in 2014, she was the only woman in her training class. Given the historically low number of women entering cardiology training programs in the U.S., this was unsurprising. Today, just 13 percent of practicing cardiologists in the U.S. are women while fewer than 6 percent of trainees are from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (UREGs), which the American Association of Medical Colleges defines as Black, Hispanic, Latinx or Native American.

Getting Personal with Blood Cancers

For most cancers, advances in genomics haven’t changed treatment strategies very much. Sandeep Dave, MD, MS, envisions making personalized treatment a reality for more patients, by developing and making better use of tools that already exist.

April Salama’s War on Metastatic Melanoma

Fifty years since the National Cancer Act of 1971 declared “War on Cancer” and a decade since the first drug, an immunotherapy, was approved to treat metastatic melanoma, a leading clinician researcher goes head to head with melanoma brain metastasis.

From Patient to Student to Physician-Researcher: Sonali Biswas’ Quest to Serve

Pursuing a career as a plastic surgeon has been a perfect fit for Sonali Biswas. Drawn to art at an early age, she would often sketch out human figures on paper, connecting bones and muscles with each scratch of her pencil or swipe of her paintbrush.