The Moore family marked dad Matthew’s 40th birthday with a special reunion following his artificial heart implant procedure. Duke Heart surgeons placed the first-in-North-America device in his chest July 12th.

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

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.

Long an advocate for others with cancer, Nancy Wright is in the middle of her second battle with the disease. It has solidified her belief in Duke as a place for personalized, advanced care.

People diagnosed with cancer enter a period of intense treatment at a cancer center, and it can seem to their primary care physicians that they have disappeared. The patient’s overall health can suffer as a result. Duke’s new Center for Onco-Primary Care aims to change that.

Jeanne Caldwell didn’t have Alzheimer’s disease, yet she knew firsthand the devastation it can cause. For 11 years she cared for her mother who had the disease. After her mother’s death in 2015, Caldwell was determined to do what she could to make sure other families did not have to endure the hardships of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

When James Junker, PhD’80, first came to Duke to pursue a PhD in pathology in the mid 1970s, he was surrounded by esteemed faculty members who were greats in their field. He credits many of them, including Joe Sommer, MD, with influencing his own successful career and for inspiring him to give back to the department that he says gave him so much. 

A portable optical tool that promises to make surgical planning easier and less invasive for children who need surgery for epilepsy will get its first tests in the clinic, thanks to a $300,000 grant from The Hartwell Foundation.

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.