When artist Judith Snyderman, RN’64, Honorary Alumna’19, was in high school in Brooklyn, New York, her grandmother had a major stroke. One side of her body was disabled, and she was moved to a nursing home. Snyderman recalls vividly how caregivers transferred her grandmother from the bed to a wheelchair. “I remember her helplessness, and I wished I could help her,” she says.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to challenge hospitals, the Duke Health System is benefitting from the generous support of companies, groups, businesses, and individuals who are providing donations of critically needed Personal Protective Equipment and meals for Duke’s many front-line healthcare providers.

The Duke University School of Nursing's Health Innovation Lab is a collaborative space that brings together the professions of nursing, medicine, and engineering, to develop and test products for use in the patient care setting. This has become especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers and staff at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and the Duke Regional Biocontainment Laboratory are working around the clock to develop therapies and a vaccine to combat COVID-19.

Researchers at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute are leaders in research aimed at developing vaccines that teach the human immune system to respond to diseases like influenza, HIV, and cytomegalovirus (CMV) which impact hundreds of thousands of people globally. The Immune Resiliency Initiative, which is part of Duke’s larger Science and Technology endeavor, encompasses this work. Duke Human Vaccine Institute is part of the Duke University School of Medicine and Duke Health.

Dr. Kristin Schroeder and her team in the Duke Global Health Institute have been working in Mwanza, Tanzania, to improve outcomes for children with cancer. They are finding that success is not always a matter of resources or equipment, but in finding creative ways to overcome the roadblocks that keep families from accessing cancer care.

Haller, of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, says the journey leading up to and after her adult daughter’s kidney transplant in 2017 was at times difficult—from being on dialysis to waiting for a donor, to learning to adjust to life after the transplant.

Like a lot of alumni, David N. Howell, learned from a number of influential mentors when he was a student and trainee at Duke. Unlike most, he married his mentor, Sara E. Miller, and together they made a substantial gift to create The Rollie Assistant/Associate Professorship of Correlative Pathology.

National cancer databases provide a ton of valuable information for researchers, but institutional data is often more granular, including details such as specific chemotherapy regimens, radiation doses, treatment durations, and recurrence rates. The Duke Breast Database (DB2), a big data initiative, is invaluable for health researchers like Oluwadamilola “Lola” Fayanju, MD, assistant professor of surgery and the principal investigator for the database.

Three leading researchers team up to explore new targets in the search for the origins of Parkinson’s disease.