Nicole McGuinness was 29 in December 2015 when she woke up already an hour late for her government relations job. She had blood on her shirt, and her tongue was swollen.

A new clinical program gets Duke medical students off campus and into the community to serve.

As students at Duke University School of Nursing, Lindsay Salisbury and Shelby Strockbine entered their third semester with a new perspective on the importance of global health and their roles as future nurses.

Yvonne Mowery, MD, PhD, Butler Harris Assistant Professor in Radiation Oncology, is one of many physician-scientists at Duke who credits the Duke University School of Medicine’s Strong Start Program for her career growth.

When reports early last winter indicated that a mysterious new infectious disease had broken out of its point of origin in Wuhan, China, Charles Lucore, MD’83, P’17, MBA, began to prepare for its possible arrival in New York.

Eric Dziuban, MD’07, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s country director for the southwest African nation of Namibia, was enjoying a weekend at the coast with his family when the call came. A Romanian couple who had recently arrived in the Namibian capital of Windhoek from Spain had fallen ill. Tests confirmed everyone’s fear: COVID-19 had finally come to Namibia.

Breast cancer researcher Donald McDonnell, PhD, met his wife, Mary, in Maine for a week of vaca­tion. Sitting at a secluded inn on Anne’s Point, McDon­nell, Coleader of the Women’s Cancer Research Program at the Duke Cancer Institute, couldn’t stop thinking about what he had heard at a meeting.

In 2016, Duke employee Brandy Chieco was a new mom with a three-month-old baby boy when her own mom, Brenda Brooks, was diagnosed with synovial sarcoma, which tends to arise in the joints.

Postdoctoral Fellow Binita Chakraborty, PhD was intrigued: in published analyses of large numbers of patients with melanoma (skin cancer) treated with an immunotherapy that is becoming standard of care, the treatment worked better in men than in women.

Turning a Terrifying Ordeal into an Opportunity to Help