Georgia Beasley was a student-athlete at Duke when she met Sara, an 11-year-old girl, who was sitting on the bleachers at Cameron Indoor Stadium. The young girl was waiting for her father, who was late to pick her up from a Duke basketball summer camp. Beasley asked her to catch rebounds for her, and Sara happily agreed. Later, her father introduced himself as none other than Henry Friedman, MD, deputy director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke.

Though K. Becky Zagor, BSN’80, RN, MN, decided very early to become a nurse, she says the decision to attend Duke wasn’t as clear-cut. First, she didn’t think she was strong enough academically to compete. And second, her father had been out of work for six months during a tough 1970s recession, meaning her family couldn’t afford Duke.

When Robert Yowell, MD’61, HS’64-’69, entered the Duke University School of Medicine in 1957, he was, by a pretty fair margin, the youngest student at the school.

Peter Kohler, MD’63, HS’64, president emeritus of Oregon Health and Science University, traces many of the foundations of his life and career back to his time at Duke.

Norman C. Shealy, BSM’56, MD’56, HS’56-’57, PhD, wakes up at 5 a.m. every weekday for a workout before heading into the clinic. “A light day is an hour of exercise,” he says. “Ninety minutes is more typical.”

For Jane Trinh, MD’02, HS’02-’06, and her husband, Peter Grossi, MD’02, HS’02- ’08, Duke University School of Medicine was the place where they met in the middle.

Gabrielle Harris’s life was forever changed in November 2012. That was when her grandmother died suddenly from a stroke. It was also when she made an important career decision that she hopes will ulti­mately make lives better for stroke survivors and their families.

Graduate school is a unique time in a person’s life, filled with extraordinary opportunities and challenges. With this in mind, leaders in the School of Medicine’s Office of Biomedical Graduate Education have developed a new resource to provide incoming PhD students with social support as they begin this exciting new chapter. The Peer Mentor Network is a resource that connects 11 current PhD student volunteer mentors with the approximately 100 incoming PhD students who will be located in one of the School’s 17 departments in Fall 2021.

Kafui Dzirasa, MD, PhD, , and Cagla Eroglu, PhD, have been named Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigators. HHMI provides its researchers with long-term flexible funding that gives them the freedom to explore and, if necessary, change direction.

Tony Sandstrom, MSN’05, collaborated with PhD student Hideyo Tsumura, Health Innovation Lab and Center for Nursing Research for development and trial.