Inspirational Stories

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a high school freshman, Elianna started baking “cookies” for their horses, using ingredients like oat flour and molasses. “It's so nice to give them something you put effort into, something from the heart," she says.

An anonymous family’s generosity will enable Duke University School of Medicine to establish one of the nation’s only programs dedicated specifically to helping girls and women with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

The Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) has been given approval to launch a Phase 1 clinical trial of one of its most promising antibody treatments for COVID-19. This would be a temporary treatment until a vaccine is developed. The DHVI also is developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine that would combat future iterations of COVID-19 and similar viruses, and also researching if saliva can be used as an accurate indicator of COVID-19 infection.

For 27 years, Heather Paradis, a 1995 graduate of Duke University’s Master of Science in Nursing Program, cared for cancer patients at Duke University Hospital as a hematology-oncology nurse practitioner. As she saw many patients fighting the disease, she had no idea that she would one day be on the other side of cancer care.

A potential new vaccine developed by members of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute has proven effective in protecting monkeys and mice from a variety of coronavirus infections — including SARS-CoV-2 as well as the original SARS-CoV-1 and related bat coronaviruses that could potentially cause the next pandemic. The findings were published in the journal Nature.

In 2011, Katie Corun was in her third semester of nursing school in Maryland when she began having personality changes—moodiness and anger. Neither she nor her husband of seven months, Ron, or her mother, Kathy, could figure out what was going on.