Meet Physicians and Scientists

The Duke Endowment of Charlotte, N.C., is supporting Duke University’s efforts to expand its faculty in computation, materials science and the resilience of the body and brain by completing the second phase of a $100 million investment.

Answering a long-standing need in the community for enhanced behavioral health services, Duke Health is opening a newly built center at Duke Regional Hospital that will provide a setting specifically designed for the comfort and care of these patients.

More than 5.3 million individuals — children and adults — permanently live with a brain injury-related disability, according to the Brain Injury Association of America. Two researchers from the Duke University School of Nursing, Tolu O. Oyesanya, PhD, RN, and  Karin Reuter-Rice, PhD, CPNP-AC, FCCM, FAAN, have devoted an aspect of their research toward better understanding the ramifications that brain injuries inflict on patients and their loved ones and how to give them the best health care possible.

Duke Health’s one-of-a-kind behavioral health building will begin welcoming patients this spring.

An immunologist, neurobiologist, virologist, and medical doctor join forces to study one of COVID-19’s stranger mysteries: the sharp loss of smell and taste.

We’re thrilled to announce the April 2021 opening of the Duke Behavioral Health Center North Durham at Duke Regional Hospital. Part of the largest construction project in the history of Duke Regional Hospital, the center brings together Duke emergency, outpatient, inpatient and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) behavioral health services in one spectacular new building.

Duke's Ed Miao, MD, PhD, a professor in the Departments of Immunology, Molecular Genetics, and Biology, was the first to demonstrate that pyroptosis (cellular suicide) is real and clears intracellular bacteria. More basic science research is needed, however, to understand why pyroptosis can occur in normal, non-infected cells, which could be implicated for sepsis.

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.

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.

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.