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I recently toured Dr. Steven Cummer’s lab in Duke Engineering to learn about metamaterials, synthetic materials used to manipulate sound and light waves. Cummer’s graduate student Abel Xie first showed me the Sound Propagator. It was made of small pieces that looked similar to legos stacked in a wall. These acoustic metamaterials were made of…

What do election polls, hospital records, and the Syrian conflict have in common? How can a hospital use a patient’s vital signs to calculate their risk of cardiac arrest in real time? Statistician Rebecca Steorts is developing advanced data analysis methods to answer these questions and other pressing real-world problems. Her research has taken her…

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Anne Buckley, a professor and  neuropathologist working in Dr. Chay Kuo’s cell biology lab at Duke. I got a first-hand account of her research on neuron development and function in mice. But just as fascinating to me were the life lessons she had learned during…

Dr. Jenny Tung is interested in the connections between genes and behavior: How does behavior influence genetic variation and regulation and how do genetic differences influence behavior? An assistant professor in the Departments of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke, Tung is interested in evolution because it gives us a window into why the living…

We live in an age where new bionic limb models appear every week and tissues can be 3D-printed. Considering these exciting advances, it should come as no surprise that researchers are coming closer to engineering functional skeletal muscle. “We’re trying to engineer skeletal muscle as a whole tissue to make it as functional as possible,…

“All these complicated diseases that we don’t have a good handle on — they all have this mechanical component. Well why is that?” This is exactly the question Brent Hoffman, Duke biomedical engineering assistant professor, is helping answer. Many of the common diseases that we fear have a mechanical component. In asthma attacks, a chemical…

Imagine two scenarios. In the first, one of your close friends is driving down the road when, from behind, they hear the sound of wailing sirens. They pull off onto a side­street and ten minutes later they’re back on the road, holding a fresh speeding ticket. In the second, imagine the exact same scenario, but…

At the Duke Global Health Institute, their academic base is relatively small; only 375 students have completed global health programs at Duke since 2008. But their partnerships span much farther than the Duke campus. Malaria researcher Randall Kramer, the Deputy Director of the Duke Global Health Institute, maintains a network of Priority Partnership Locations (PPLs),…

Landscape ecologist Jennifer Swenson has a very special set of skills that come from having an “unconventional academic trajectory.” Her diverse and interesting career began at UC Santa Barbara, where she chose to learn about International Relations and Geography. “I wanted to be versatile and globally aware,” she said. Undergraduate school is where she learned…

I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Duke Professor Junfeng “Jim” Zhang, an avid environmental health researcher who has done amazing work on air pollution research. Because of my own interest in air pollution and its adverse health effects, I began by trying to grasp Dr. Zhang’s work through his detailed scientific explanations of…

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…

Walking up to the Trent Semans Center at Duke University to interview Dr. Daniel O. Schmitt, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and teacher of anatomy at Duke University, I couldn’t help but wonder why he would pursue seemingly unrelated interests. On one hand, he studies the locomotion and evolution of primates while at the same time,…