Month: December 2014

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), is tucked away behind the supermarkets and youth-infested restaurants on Ninth Street in Durham. It’s a National Science Foundation brainchild with the purpose of consolidating data collected on small scales to help evolutionary biologists answer larger scale questions. NESCent pursues a variety of missions, from answering these big ideas…

For those who study antibiotic resistance, a future where people die from infected cuts or the measles is not some horrible alternative universe but something that could very well be a reality soon. In 1998, the House of Lords in London gave a stark report proclaiming, “Antibiotic resistance threatens mankind with the prospect of a…

How do scientific research and social commentary relate? The answer became clear during my conversation with Rotem Ben-Shachar, a PhD candidate in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics program at Duke, who is interested in understanding the infectious disease dynamics of dengue fever. But she’s also pondering the reasons why female scientists are leaving prestigious career…

Viruses are very cool.  Ashley Sobel taught me that. Sobel is an MD/PHD student at Duke.  She currently works in the Koelle Research Group, a group that focuses on using mathematical models to understand the “ecological and evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases.” When I asked Ashley what in particular drew her to infectious diseases, she…