From left: Courtney Lewis, Roo George-Warren, and Aaron Baumgardner at a Duke Gardens panel about food sovereignty.
“Larger mainstream society is so removed from their food,” says Courtney Lewis, a Duke professor and Cherokee Nation citizen. She recently moderated a discussion at the Duke Gardens about food sovereignty with two Catawba Nation citizens.
Roo George-Warren is an artist, educator, and eco-cultural restorationist, and Aaron Baumgardner is a basket maker, seed steward, and plant ecologist. Their conversation was moderated by Lewis, who is the Crandall Family Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Inaugural Director of the Native American Studies Initiative at Duke University.
What is food sovereignty?
“Most people… are more familiar with the term food security,” says George-Warren, but he considers that term insufficient “because technically that can be solved through Walmart gift cards.” Food sovereignty, in George-Warren’s view, encompasses bigger questions about cultural value, rights to seeds, and who performs labor involving food.
“How are we going to take control of our food systems on a systematic level?” he asks.
Baumgardner thinks about food sovereignty as a “community’s ability to take control of the entire food system and not have to rely on any outside factors.” That means asking questions like “Where’s the food coming from, and how’s the food getting to people’s tables?” as well as what food is on people’s tables.
Food sovereignty, Baumgardner says, is about the ability to take care of ourselves, even in a crisis, by controlling food production and distribution. “If we aren’t a food-sovereign nation, are we really a sovereign nation?”
Gourds in the Southeastern Indigenous Peoples’ Garden seasonal display area at the Duke Gardens. Some of the seeds in this garden were shared by Lewis, who got them from the Eastern Band of Cherokee, Cherokee Nation seed banks, community members, and her own garden. Photo by Duke Gardens volunteer photographer Sue Lannon.
How does seed stewardship relate to food sovereignty?
“The seeds are our relatives, and those seeds need to grow,” Baumgardner says. Certain plants hold great importance to the Catawba people, and efforts to “rematriate” their seeds helps ensure the plants’ survival now and in the future.
Seed stewardship, Baumgardner says, is about more than preserving seeds. It also involves actively using the plants that have been important to Catawba culture for generations, restoring a “relationship… of seed-saving.”
Corn, George-Warren says, has been grown by the Catawba for millennia. “We’re standing at one end of the last 500 years,” he says, “looking back at everything that has been lost and taken from us.” That requires mourning but also efforts to move forward.
Baumgardner sees value in blending traditional knowledge and western science. He mentions a partnership with Davidson College in which Catawba citizens and researchers at the college are collaborating on experiments with corn. There are records of Catawba people bending corn stalks back at a certain point in their development, and the work at Davidson is exploring whether that practice could help protect corn from fungus.
George-Warren discusses another program that distributes local produce to tribal families, serving 250-300 families per month. Such programs aim to increase access to local food and restore relationships between people and plants.
How does natural resource management relate to your work?
“I don’t think that that accurately reflects how our people see the world or our relationship to it,” Baumgardner says about the term “natural resources.” He explains that the Catawba language does not have a word that directly translates to “natural” or “resources.” The term resources, he says, “implies that something is to be used… that it has a finite purpose,” which is not how the Catawba have historically viewed the environment. And in a world not divided into “natural” and “unnatural,” that linguistic distinction wasn’t needed, either.
Baumgardner believes that natural and cultural resources should be intertwined and that relationships to food should “create space for ceremony, create space for thanksgiving.”
Land can be nurtured without viewing it as an expendable, finite “resource.” European settlers, Lewis says, viewed the Appalachian region as a garden of Eden. “The reason it was that beautiful,” she says, “is you had entire nations actually managing that forest.”
George-Warren references a false narrative that native peoples just have an intuitive or magical knowledge of the earth. That is “ludicrous,” he says—knowledge comes from experimentation, observation, and having lived in a place for a long time.
George-Warren describes himself and Baumgardner as “ecocultural restorationists,” working to preserve both culture and ecology. The idea that humans and nature are inherently divided, he says, plays into dangerous narratives: that humans are a “virus” whose “only role is a damaging one” and that we should “put nature in a glass box” to protect it.
“I hate both of those views,” George-Warren says, “because the reality is we are a part of nature… we can help it flourish.”
“We have to create the culture of caring about those things,” George-Warren says. “We want people to work toward that interspecies flourishing.”
Dean Sue on East Campus, giving a tour as the Dean of Students
Half a century at Duke University. And many more years to come.
For more than 40 cohorts of Duke students, Sue Wasiolek has served as their Dean of Students, affectionately known to all as Dean Sue. Today, she is back in the classroom as an adjunct professor in the program of education, teaching several classes this semester on free speech, civil discourse, and education law.
For many in the Class of 2028, Dean Sue may be an unfamiliar figure. Having gotten to chat with her several times since August, first meeting at a Project Citizen dinner during orientation week, I cannot help but share Dean Sue’s insights and advice with my fellow freshmen and students at large. So, just like many of my peers, I FLUNCHed with Dean Sue on Monday and invited her to share her perspective on undergraduate education and how students can best formulate their journey in a rapidly changing world.
To begin our interview, I asked Dean Sue to introduce herself to new students and briefly describe her relationship with the student body. Besides stating her formal role and faculty appointment, Dean Sue emphasized that her previous tenure as Dean still heavily influences her perspective as a professor. “I would have a very hard time overlooking the fact that I had been a Dean of Students here for over 40 years,” she said. “I do think about the student experience through this lens of student life and community building and wellbeing, and that is not the way most faculty think.” Just from listening to that brief introduction, I was again astounded by the deep-rooted, unchangeable connection Dean Sue has with Duke students, particularly first-year students.
Next, I invited Dean Sue to explain the motivation and creation process behind her work, “Getting the Best Out of College.” Funny enough, I did misread the title when I posed the question, labelling it as “Getting the Most Out of College.” This small slip-up led to a lengthy exploration of the book’s title and mission, and unbeknownst to me before the interview, the word choice of “best” versus “most” was precisely the object of contention between the co-authors, which also included Professor Peter Feaver and alumna Anne Crossman. “In order to sell this book, [Dr. Feaver] felt like we needed to appeal to students and their parents,” said Dean Sue. And perhaps because of the final decision of “best” and orienting the book towards a noble end, the book suffered in sales performance. “I still get royalty checks from the publisher, and I got maybe $13 last year? And that’s likely an exaggeration,” she said.
Discussing the work’s inspiration, Dean Sue said that Professor Feaver believed that the combination of student, faculty, and administrator perspectives featured in the book made it a rich, insightful read. “We cannot find another book like it… everything was admissions-based,” she explained. And despite not receiving an Oprah’s Book List nomination or other accolades for the first two editions, Dean Sue is convinced of the book’s literary value and pursuing a third edition. “The last edition came out in 2012, and the smartphone came out in 2008”, she stated, discussing the need to include pertinent content like transferring and technology in a new edition.
Perhaps the most insightful exchange I had with Dean Sue over delectable food from JB’s was when I posed the question, “What is your message to students from underserved backgrounds intent to go down a certain academic path in regard to their willingness to fully explore at Duke?” To my surprise, Dean Sue replied that her advice for such students is not any different from wealthy students. “What today may appear to bring you great financial stability may not do so 10 or 15 years from now,” she said, encouraging students to know their values and “why” that they are studying what they study. “This takes great courage, but fully explore and get off the treadmill, [which is] what you think you want to do as a career,” Dean Sue advised. Her message of taking advantage of Duke’s amazing faculty and curriculum is one I am sure all of us could take to heart.
Before I close, I must relay the centerpiece of Dean Sue’s recommendation: do not declare anything beyond your required major! “Anything beyond that limits what you can take,” she said. And this includes anything from a second major to a minor or certificate. Why not opt to explore Art History instead of taking your fifth Economics minor class when you can write “extensive coursework in economics” on your resume anyway? That is a question that many Economics students must ponder about.
I would be writing forever if I wanted to capture all the wonderful details from my conversation with Dean Sue. Her wisdom, compassion, empathy, and boundless support continues to impress all who know her, including myself. To all who have yet to interacted with her, I strongly encourage you to go out of your way to embrace her friendly smile, which you can spot around both East and West Campus.
I find it easier to explain myself through my experiences with others’ writing.
Sarah as a baby, reading of course
If you were to peer into my soul, you would see a display of my late-night highlighted sentences and the pen’s ink bruising my favorite words. And if you were to peer into my brain, you would see what happens when a reader of fiction and non-fiction and poetry and everything in between falls in love and decides (or more accurately, realizes) that these are who will teach her.
However, this isn’t true for all of me. For example, my name is Sarah Suzanne Pusser. Though I would like to say my parents named me after their favorite heroine in a book, I hate to inform you that my name is a medley of my family’s names before me — Sarah, being my mother’s middle name, Suzanne, being my aunt’s middle name, and Pusser, being the last name my father brought to the family that either people can’t pronounce or are too scared to try to.
But who am I if only the attributes I never got to choose for myself?
Sarah and her friend Kristina, both reading on their vacation to Mexico.
I grew up being told that knowledge is power. And while this is true, knowledge can also be “silly.” On my seventh birthday, I was gifted Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing,” along with the rest of the “Fudge” series. It was my treat after what felt like a lifetime of farm chores (I had to pick blueberries). Curled up in a ball on my bed, I just remember laughing, and laughing, and laughing. And in the moments of silence, I remember learning that it wasn’t just me who thought being an older sibling was hard.
I am someone who finds both purpose and joy in learning. I am a proud older sister to the most wonderful younger brother.
In eighth grade, I wanted to challenge myself by reading a “really difficult book.” So, of course, I chose John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and boy did I hate it. I spent weeks forcing myself to “just get to the next page.” But eventually, I was done with the book, and with the feeling of pride for keeping my promise to finish the book came another feeling that something else had to be done; every piece of information I’d just read deserved to continue living. I talked to everyone I could. I asked my friends what they thought happened when they died (I know, what a mood killer), I asked my parents if they believed in religion, and through this relationship of telling and questioning, I taught those around me a single perspective (John Bunyan’s), and in return gained the perspective of dozens of others.
Sarah on the farm in western North Carolina where she grew up
I am someone who keeps a promise (no matter how indigestible the writing is). I am someone who asks questions. I am someone who believes that curiosity and teaching should be paired together.
I picked up Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” because I loved the cover, and you can imagine my excitement when I figured out that the story was even better. I found myself sneaking a headlamp into my room on school nights so I could learn more about the life of Theodore Decker; simply put, this was my first instance of being emotionally attached to a book. I just needed to read it. Writing this now, I can’t really put into words why I loved this book—all I know is that this was the book that revealed my love of writing. I saw how language changed my perception of the world, and I wanted to be the creator of that for others.
I am a writer. I am a writer. I am a writer.
Now, as a member of Duke’s class of 2028 and the Duke Research Blog, I am excited to introduce my curiosity to the infinite realms of research at Duke and let my love for writing curate the questions and answers into something you will look forward to reading.
Many of us enter the Duke library complex through the Rubenstein doors, especially on rainy days. However, despite passing countless times, most have never ventured into the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library or checked out its artifacts – including some eye-catching items featured at the annual Engineering Expo on September 18.
How could I not start by describing the 16th-century amputation saw? The magnificent artifact was handled by many impressed visitors, including myself (see adjacent photo). The embroidery was exuberant, and Rachel Ingold, the Curator of the History of Medicine Collections, informed me that the saw was of European descent. She also pointed out that the blade is removable and appears different from the rest of the artifact, suggesting that the instrument has been so frequently used that the blade had to be replaced. I curiously asked whether historians know how many patients have been victimized by this gruesome, two-person saw… sadly, the answer is we don’t know. Merely the thought of the procedure makes me shudder.
Me holding the amputation blade… it should’ve been held by two people back in the day!
While the saw was the headline artifact, it was by no means the only spotlight! Brooke Guthrie, a Research Services Librarian staffing the event, suggested that I examine Robert Hooke’s “Micrographia,” her personal favorite. In particular, she pointed out the exquisite scientific illustration of a flea, which was recorded using an early microscope. The level of detail (such as the hairs and claws) captured by Hooke in the drawing was fascinating – and spooky! What’s more amazing was that the copy we were looking at was the first edition, now more than 350 years old.
From my conversation with Guthrie, I learned that the Rubenstein Library boasts an expansive portfolio, ranging from the History of Medicine Collections to the Hartman Center for Advertising and Marketing History and the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. While the library is interested in the areas correlated to its existing centers, the acquisition of materials is also heavily guided by student and faculty interests, which is evident in the diversity of Rubenstein collections. For instance, did you know that you could spend an afternoon with historically significant comic books? If that’s not your thing, you could opt to bring a few friends and spend some time playing ancient board games instead.
During my visit, I also spoke to Andy Armacost, Head of Collection Development at the Rubenstein. He introduced me to my favorite artifacts at the event, both hailing from the Hartman Center’s Consumer Reports Collection. The first was an apparatus testing the quality of razor blades: the wood frame was covered with meandering strings and fixtures, with the experimental blade placed adjacent to the test material, positioned in the center of the entire object. The second was a newer device, the structure composed of metal and testing toothpaste, which was applied by a toothbrush onto a grimy dental fixture. Both Armacost and I chuckled at the thought of making the fake teeth “dirty” before each trial… it must have been a sight for the experimenters!
Can you spot the remaining residue on the artificial teeth? Crest needs to do better according to this test machine!
Duke community members continued to stream in to event. Right as I was about to visit the “make a button” station, I spotted Pratt Dean Jerome Lynch in the room as well, testing out visual perception glasses that turned 2D images into 3D scenes. As a Biomedical Engineering student, I could not help walking over to him and asking a few questions regarding his perspective on the exhibition. Lynch was extremely welcoming to my questions and offered many words of advice to Pratt students regarding utilizing the libraries’ rich resources. He encouraged engineering students to frequent the Rubenstein collections, arguing that the artifacts illuminate the evolution of the role of engineers and how previous engineers creatively addressed the great contemporary challenges. He also expressed his personal interest in history… thus defeating any claims that engineers could not simultaneously enjoy the humanities.
The perception goggles that both Dean Lynch and I peeked into during the Engineering Extravaganza!
Before leaving, I made sure to speak to Ingold again, given that she was a leading organizer of the event. Well, she maintains that it was a group effort, so perhaps I should edit “leading organizer” into “co-organizer.” Anyhow, she expressed strong enthusiasm for student involvement in the Rubenstein collections, calling for those interested in exhibit curation to reach out and seek opportunities to do so. She also touted an upcoming Spring exhibition and the likely return of the extravaganza next Fall… Keep vigilant on more information for these events!
Next time you enter through Rubenstein doors, take a moment to check out the storied collections. I promise you will not be disappointed!
Since move-in day, I have repeated this introduction hundreds of times. Curiously, I received a lot of “that’s a cool name!” comments in response… enough times to make me pause and think about my name and the history behind it.
“Stone” has not always been a source of pride. Imagine the fun middle schoolers had with it: “ColdStone,” “Stone Cold,” “You Rock,” and other variations. And the name was supposed to be a refuge: my legal name, Shidong, has been so frequently mispronounced by teachers (typically on the first day of school) that I had been convinced that Stone would be a better choice.
The unfortunate nicknames aside, I found explaining the origin of “Stone” to be a hassle. After all, my legal name’s meaning had nothing to do with pebbles or other igneous creations. The Chinese character “shi” meant soldier and the character “dong” translated to scholarship. When I arrive here during some conversations, I find myself often disappointed that the profound meaning behind my name is often thought of in terms of rocks.
Why the lengthy introspection about a few letters? In my few weeks here at Duke, I realized that I am experiencing a rejuvenation in my identity, encouraged by “that’s a cool name!” comments. My name, who I am, what my interests are, and other factors are no longer restricted by previous limitations in the form of high school curriculum, club offerings, or social culture. I am interacting with much more diverse students who, like me, have long and winding life stories and are willing to share them with others.
In short, the personal biography I am about to share with you is dynamic. At Duke, my mission is to explore as much as possible, both in the classroom and beyond, doing things that I would have despised a few short years ago (going against upper class students’ advice on course selection is an egregious sin for young Stone). It is possible that in a semester or two, my academic and extracurricular interests will have shifted so radically that none of what I wrote below is still accurate. Maybe that is my most important trait right now: willingness to experiment and change my mind. This is what led me to this opportunity with the Research Blog and why what you are reading exists in the internet world.
Stone with his parents in Park Güell, Barcelona
Now onto the “traditional” introduction: I am Stone Yan, a first-year student pursuing Biomedical Engineering. I hail from Chicago, Illinois, where the weather is as unpredictable as Durham, but the humidity is never intolerable. I am interested in medicine as my career after graduation, and I hope to study some health policy courses here in addition to my Pratt curriculum. I would describe myself as hard-working, curious, and determined.
Outside of grinding academics, I love to play the piano, play badminton, follow the news, and hang out with friends. Running, drawing, and watching YouTube are also favorite pastimes. My most hated household chore is folding laundry… I can never fold the clothes neat enough. My deepest fear is someone dumping my washed and dried clothes on the ground after I forgot to run to the laundry room… Randolph friends, please do not do this to me.
Hopefully, there were some sentiments shared here that you echoed. My mission as a blogger with the Research Blog is to broadcast tidbits that we do not typically notice and call our attention to amazingness overshadowed by other amazingness (too much of this on campus!). My focus will probably be on the people that make Duke special to all of us: the faculty, staff, students, athletes, alumni, and community members that make us proud to be Blue Devils.
I cannot conclude without giving a shoutout to my parents. As an only child, I was remarkably close to them, and I cannot thank them enough for their boundless support.
Cheers to celebrating Duke’s rich community in future blogs!
Is the upcoming national election essentially a wartime election? According to award-winning journalist Kyle Spencer, it is.
“It’s not the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party,” Spencer said. “It’s the Democratic Party vs the possibility of an authoritarian regime.”
During Spencer’s hour-long Sept. 11 talk, her voice wavered, her cheeks flushed, and her tone brimmed with excitement; she was here to tell Duke why they must fight for democracy, and she sure did leave an impression.
Kyle Spencer, Journalist
Spencer had a way of making us – the youth in the audience – feel seen, reminding us of the influence we held. It wasn’t just about politics. It was about empowering us to recognize the undeniable volume of our voices in shaping the future.
The Gen Z vote matters perhaps “more than any generation in history,” Spencer claimed. According to her, we’re the most diverse generation, and therefore, suppressing our vote would leave a grave impact.
“Voter suppression of young people can be understood as suppressing the vote of people of color,” Spencer said. Her comment sent chills down my spine. I’m a person of color. That comment felt close to home.
On the topic of voter suppression, the crowd expressed their frustration about the government not accepting Duke student’s virtual ID as an authentic form of identification. To which Spencer warned us about the predominant effects nation-wide to render the logistics of voting complex and arduous.
“You have to be savvy about the fact that there is a huge effort to discount your votes,” she said.
Students have power through their votes, but Spencer’s research suggests that organizations and political parties may be doing their best to suppress it. The reality is, if the logistics of voting are hard, you really need to care to go through those hurdles to cast it. This is rare, and certainly not enough to convince all eligible student voters to vote.
When I asked a member of the audience what she thought about efforts by organizations to bully Democrats, she pointed toward social media as a widely used tool — something Spencer mentioned in her talk.
“She mentioned all these organizations, such as ‘Turning Point USA’, and it really got me thinking – were all these YouTubers who were showcasing liberals to be extremely unintelligent even showing us the full debate? Is it just another jab at spreading false propaganda by twisting the reality?” Mariam, a sophomore at Duke, said.
Honestly, I felt seen — because same! There was a time when my YouTube feed was home to Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Candace Owens. It felt like a suffocating echo-chamber (blame the algorithm!).
When Spencer talked about YouTuber and political activist Charlie Kirk under the heading “Bullies or Buddies,” I felt an instant connection with the crowd, as if we were all telepathic. Mariam, Shreya, and a plethora of other students at the talk knew him as the guy who visits college campuses, debates liberal ideologies, and embarrasses his opponents. Spencer’s research for her book “Raising Them Right” may provide us insight to his possible agenda: such YouTubers tend to bully the opponents of their ideologies to discourage their votes, and be buddies with their proponents to create a fraternity-like atmosphere.
Why? To discourage votes!
Spencer’s research accentuated how voter suppression is strategically used as an authoritarian tool, particularly targeting young people and minority groups. She highlighted historical examples, such as the Lindy Johnson Act and the Civil Rights Movement, which fought against voter intimidation tactics.
She referenced the Beachhead theory, teleporting us to the dialogue of well-known Republican donors: “Get ourselves on campus then go from there” she quoted. Spencer described these as “war-like references.”
The audience seemed to nod in disappointment. Perhaps our telepathy striked again: if this was true, what has, and will, become of America?
Spencer was here to spark a conversation about civic engagement and the importance of staying informed. While “Raising Them Right” explores the rise of conservative youth movements, the real takeaway was a reminder that young people today have a critical role to play in shaping the future; and it’s crucial to be informed on the myriad of ways organizations from either political spectrum might try to take away our voice. So, we are equipped to steal our voices back.
Spencer left us with a sense of responsibility, encouraging all of us—regardless of political leaning—to recognize the power of our vote and the importance of participating in the democratic process.
In the early 20th century, a transformative movement quietly took root in America’s rural South, shaping the educational and economic future of African American families.
This movement centered around the Rosenwald Schools, modest one-, two-, and three-teacher buildings that exclusively served over 700,000 Black children between 1917 and 1932.
A historical marker along NC 32 south near Luke Street in Edenton commemorates the first Rosenwald School in North Carolina. Credit: NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources
These nearly 5,000 rural schoolhouses emerged from an unexpected collaboration between two visionaries: Booker T. Washington, an influential educator and African American thought leader, and Julius Rosenwald, a German-Jewish immigrant who amassed wealth as the head of Sears, Roebuck & Company.
In 1912, Rosenwald donated $25,000 to aid Black colleges and preparatory academies. Washington proposed using a portion of these funds to build rural elementary schools in Black communities.
Project lead Alec Greenwald and students discuss their efforts to map a 20th century educational experiment across the Black Belt region of North Carolina. Video by Wil Weldon.
Over the next two decades, Rosenwald Schools sprouted across the South. The Rosenwald program significantly boosted literacy rates and school attendance among rural Southern Blacks. Students who attended these schools received a better education, leading to increased years of schooling.
The Rosenwald program trained a generation of future civil rights leaders, including Maya Angelou, Medgar Evers, John Lewis, and members of the Little Rock Nine.
Exploring the legacy of Kala Bagai, an early Indian woman in America
Every evening after wrapping up his archival research at the University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. candidate Arko Dasgupta would stroll into downtown Berkeley. Just one block away from the university, he would pause at “Kala Bagai Way,” a street name that always sparked his interest.
“Kala Bagai Way” in Berkeley, California. Credit: Arko Dasgupta
Standing there, he often found himself lost in thought, wondering: Why do I know so little about Kala Bagai? What was her story? Why was this street in Berkeley named after her?
Dasgupta, a Doctoral Scholar with Duke’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, already had research interests in early Indian migration in the United States, so he decided to investigate.
In exploring her life, Dasgupta’s goal has been clear: to bring Kala Bagai’s story to light in both India and the United States. “I hope readers come to appreciate the complexities that immigrants wishing to start life in the United States encountered in the last century and still today,” he says.
Upon his initial investigation, Dasgupta learned that in September 2020 the Berkeley City Council renamed the street in honor of Kala Bagai, one of the first Indian women to immigrate to the United States.
This recognition came from the very town that, over a 100 years earlier, had greeted her and her family with cruelty and hostility.
Dasgupta was fascinated. This topic became the focus of his recent article published the India International Centre Quarterly. “I wanted to dig deeper into the life of Kala Bagai who arrived in this country at a time when there were hardly any women from India here”, he says.
Kala Bagai with her husband Vaishno Das Bagai and their three children. Photo courtesy of Rani Bagai and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
Kala Bagai arrived in the U.S. in 1915, a time when Indian women were rare in America. Her husband, Vaishno Das Bagai, was involved in the Ghadar Movement, which sought to challenge British colonial rule from its base in the United States. Despite their financial comfort, the Bagai family faced significant racism in their new setting, exemplified by their rejection when trying to settle in Berkeley.
When they purchased a home in Berkeley, California, their new neighbors locked them out of their house and prevented them from moving in.
“The Bagais, unlike their neighbors, were not White” Dasgupta says.
In 1923, two years after Vaishno Das Bagai had become a U.S. citizen, the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind stripped him of his citizenship, ruling that Indians were not “white” and therefore ineligible for citizenship. Five years later, crushed by the injustice and having had to forego their assets, Vaishno Das took his own life.
Photo of Kala Bagai courtesy of Rani Bagai and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
“Being a single mother to three children under these circumstances in a country that could be unwelcoming to people of her racial background was doubtlessly challenging,” Dasgupta says.
After losing her husband, Kala Bagai faced the challenges of single motherhood in San Francisco head-on. Determined not to be defeated, she enrolled in night school to learn English and, with the help of a banker, wisely invested her late husband’s life insurance in stocks, securing her family’s financial future.
Kala’s strength and resilience shaped her path forward. She became a philanthropist and joined the American Wives of India, fostering cultural connections. Her son, Ram, became a key figure in the Indian American community, even supporting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Movement.
In the 1950s, after the Luce-Celler Act granted U.S. citizenship to Indians, Kala purchased property in Los Angeles. Her home became a welcoming haven for South Asian students from UCLA, where her hospitality and warmth made her beloved in the community.
“She enjoyed hosting, feeding, and taking care of people!” Dasgupta says, highlighting her deep commitment to nurturing those around her.
Kala became a pillar of the South Asian community in Southern California, earning the affectionate title of Jhaiji, or grandmother, and was widely recognized as a founding member of the Indian community there.
Her legacy, rooted in resilience, endures in the lasting impact she made by promoting cultural understanding and inspiring others to uplift and connect with their communities. Her unwavering commitment to these values continues to influence and empower those who follow in her footsteps.
“This story is worth telling because it enriches the larger story of early immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, particularly in a field that is mainly populated by the stories of men” Dasgupta says.
You can read Dasgupta’s full piece in the Summer 2024 issue of IIC Quarterly.
Editors Note:I want to tell you a story about voter suppression and political chaos on the eve of a national election. My country, Pakistan, has some unfortunate first-hand experience in what might happen if your leaders abandon the Constitution.
On May 9, 2023, I had just finished my Pakistani A-levels, and was preparing to give my final examinations (Cambridge Board). Unfortunately, it wasn’t just a routine day of losing myself into a thick – boring – textbook. My phone blew up with every news outlet I subscribed to sending ‘breaking news’ notifications: 90 people had barged into the Islamabad High Court to arrest former Prime Minister Imran Khan on charges of corruption with the Al Qadir trust. He had been accused of illegally selling state gifts.
This sensationalized arrest was no surprise, Khan, who had been removed from office by a no confidence vote in 2022, had been criticizing the military of Pakistan for months. This was the first time this had ever happened, but no one was surprised. After all, we have never had a Prime Minister complete a five-year term since 1947.
Even though the public had seen it coming, they weren’t going to remain silent; violent protests broke out everywhere. I was at my friend’s house at the time. We heard something was going on but didn’t make much of it. Protests are normal.
We were wrong. The public was outraged by Khan’s arrest, and their reaction matched that anger.
I didn’t know all the facts to make up a strong opinion. Honestly, no one did. We just knew that we had to fight for Khan – the evidence behind his charges weren’t strong and his arrest seemed illegal. (It was, the Supreme Court recently ruled.) The arrest felt planned by the military and the PMLN (Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz – a dynastic political party run by Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif, one of the richest men in Pakistan).
I remember returning from my friend’s house during a media and electricity blackout. We were minutes away from the protest happening in my city, Lahore. With no uber or signals on our phones, we took a Rickshaw (open-air taxi) to get closer. Little did I know I would be witnessing the protest first-hand; it quickly turned violent. As chaos erupted around me, I sat in the rickshaw, covering my face, praying for my dear life while people mere feet away from me were wielding sticks, breaking cars and windows. They were angry at the system and this was their way of vocalizing it.
I was so shaken by the experience that I didn’t leave my house for weeks after. But I was also constricted by choice. The protests spiraled into brutality.
Protesters stormed the General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army in Rawalpindi and torched the corps commander’s residence in Lahore. They also attempted to vandalize the ISI headquarters. In retaliation, the army resorted to using firearms to scatter the demonstrators, further intensifying the unrest.
I recall discussing this with my mother: were the protestors wrong? The governance of the country had failed them – it had imposed unlawful methods to arrest not only Imran Khan, but over 105 workers of PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf), the party he led.
Perhaps the truth is that there is no right or wrong answer to this question. From a democratic perspective, the people wanted Khan to lead them. And from a legal standpoint, his arrest was illegal. But the violence in the protests seemed rather extreme.
On the other hand, if it wasn’t extreme, would they even be noticed?
Ultimately, all these questions amounted to nothing: PTI workers were leaving the party or getting arrested with over 3,100 protestors country-wide. Essentially, demolishing the political party. The military was not going to tolerate unrest, and their actions were a testament to that. The protests stopped, by force, not choice.
A few months later, the Election Commission of Pakistan set a date for elections on February 8, 2024.
Imran Khan? Still in jail. PTI workers? Still in jail.
Who would stand for elections? PTI party members as independents, and of course, PMLN and PPP (Pakistan People’s Party – another dynastic political party – led by Bilalwal Bhutto).
I was lucky enough to leave Duke for a week to visit Pakistan during this time. Voting has always been important to me, so I wasn’t going to waste that right (just as Americans should vote on November 5th!).
From what I witnessed, Punjab (the province I live in) was largely in favor of Khan and supported the PTI independents, and the opinion polls proved that. The elections, however, didn’t go as planned. Allegedly, the elections were rigged by the PMLN and the army.
I thought so too. Casting a vote was hard. There was a media blackout and the voting process was way more complicated than it needed to be. In Pakistan, you vote by stamping a symbol of a political party on your ballot. Most people rely on symbols rather than the name written next to it. The famous cricket bat symbol long associated with PTI was instead being used by PMLN members. It seemed like an attempt to baffle the public. A vote for the bat symbol was no longer a vote for PTI.
The Pakistani ballot uses symbols for each party. You vote by stamping a symbol. This year, the cricket bat changed parties, probably to create confusion.
When I went to vote, there were tents outside the building: hundreds of people were attempting to educate the public on the meaning of the symbols. They gave out a pamphlet explaining in detail who you should vote for, given who you support. This was a sight I had never witnessed. People weren’t spreading awareness on the significance of voting, they were spreading awareness on the logistics of voting. It was that complicated.
Election results were supposed to come out 24 hours after polling had stopped, but they were delayed for more than 48 hours. Many of the voting numbers didn’t add up while, in my house, we had the news on constantly that week. First, the independents were winning. Suddenly, the votes for PMLN skyrocketed overnight. We already had an inkling of the impossibility of PTI’s win, despite the overwhelming sentiment of the public. The initial nation-wide celebrations took a sharp turn.
A part of us already knew the outcome, but the feeling of defeat still lingered. The PTI independents had lost in Punjab. A coalition government between PMLN and PPP was officially in office. The rest is history.
This is a story that began two years ago and still remains unresolved. Imran Khan is still behind bars, and people are left disillusioned. Something has felt ‘off’ from the start, and it continues to feel that way. Yet, despite the uncertainty, we find ourselves unable to act. Protesting leads to arrests, and questioning the system is seen as defiance.
My love for Pakistan runs deep. It’s not just the corrupt system or the unanswered questions that frustrate me—it’s the silencing of a nation that, at its core, is full of resilient, passionate people. Pakistanis are fighters. We’ve always stood up for what we believe in. What we need now is the freedom to express that belief without fear.
Until then, the fight continues in Pakistan, in whatever form it can take.
Democracy isn’t just a word, it’s an action, a responsibility. When the people’s voice is stifled, when powerful figures twist the law for their gain, it’s not just the system that crumbles—it’s the spirit of a nation. Don’t take your freedoms for granted, because once they’re stripped away, it’s a long, painful battle to win them back. So, let’s fight for our future on November 5th!
New maps of Durham released by students in Duke’s Data+ research program show the Bull City as a patchwork of red, white and pink. But what looks like a haphazardly assembled quilt is actually a picture of the socioeconomic realities facing Durham’s 32,000-plus public school students.
The color patches represent the home values across Durham, showing roughly where more and less affluent students live. The darker the red, the higher-priced their housing.
Like cities and neighborhoods, schools face economic disparities too. Research shows that school segregation by race and class in North Carolina has gotten steadily worse over the last three decades.
A 2024 study by North Carolina State University revealed that the typical low-income student attends schools where more than 70% of their classmates are low-income too — a trend that worsens the achievement gap between the richest and poorest children.
A new student assignment plan that Durham Public Schools is rolling out this year aims to combat that trend by redrawing district boundary lines — the thick black lines on the map — to make schools more diverse and equitable.
But if schools are to tackle economic segregation, they’ll need accurate ways to measure it as Durham continues to grow and change.
As kids across Durham head back to class, some 1500 elementary school students are changing schools this year under the Durham Public Schools Growing Together plan, which aims to increase equity and access across schools.
That was the challenge facing a team in Duke’s Data+ program this summer. For 10 weeks, Duke students Alex Barroso and Dhaval Potdar collaborated with school planners at Durham Public Schools to look at how family wealth and poverty are distributed across the school system.
“Socioeconomic status is a complicated thing,” said Barroso, a Duke junior majoring in statistical science.
For years, the standard way to identify children in need was using free and reduced-price lunch statistics from the National School Lunch Program, along with published income data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
But those numbers can be unreliable, Barroso said.
Changing state and federal policies mean that more districts — including Durham Public Schools — are providing free meals to all students, regardless of their family income. But as a result, schools no longer have an exact count of how many students qualify.
And Census estimates are based on geographic boundaries that can mask important variation in the data when we look more closely.
At a symposium in Gross Hall in July, Barroso pointed to several dark red patches (i.e., more expensive housing) bordering white ones (i.e., more affordable) on one of the team’s maps.
In some parts of the city, homes worth upwards of a million dollars abut modest apartments worth a fraction of that, “which can skew the data,” he said.
The problem with Census estimates “is that everyone who lives in that area is reported as having the same average income,” said team lead Vitaly Radsky, a PhD student at UNC’s School of Education and school planner with Durham Public Schools.
So they took a different approach: using homes as a proxy for socioeconomic status.
Research has confirmed that students from higher-value homes perform better in school as measured by standardized math tests.
The team created a custom script that fetches publicly available data on every home in Durham from sources such as Durham Open Data and the Census, and then automatically exports it to a dashboard that shows the data on a map.
“Every single house is accounted for within this project,” Barroso said.
They ran into challenges. For example, Census data are tied to tracts that don’t necessarily align with the district boundaries used by schools, said Dhaval Potdar, a graduate student in Duke’s Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science.
One takeaway from their analysis, Potdar said, is no one yardstick sums up the economic well-being of every student.
In Durham, the typical public school student lives in a home valued at about $300,000.
But the picture varies widely when you zoom in on different geographic scales and footprints.
It’s also a different story if you account for the significant fraction of Durham families who live among neighbors in a larger building such as an apartment, townhouse or condominium, instead of a single-family home.
Considering a home’s age can change the picture too.
Generally speaking, students who live in more expensive homes come from more affluent families. But in many parts of the U.S., home prices have far outpaced paychecks. That means a home that has soared in value in the years since it was purchased may not reflect a family’s true economic situation today, particularly if their income remained flat.
The team’s data visualizations aim to let school planners look at all those factors.
There are still issues to be ironed out. For example, there’s some work to be done before planners can make apples-to-apples comparisons between a student whose family owns their home versus renting a similar property, Barroso said.
“No data source is perfect,” but the research offers another way of anticipating the shifting needs of Durham students, Radsky said.
“The traditional metrics really aren’t getting at the granular fabric of the Durham community,” said Mathew Palmer, the district’s senior executive director of school planning and operational services.
Research like this helps address questions like, “are we putting our resources where the kids need them the most? And are schools equitable?”
“This analysis gives schools more tools moving forward,” Palmer said.
Maggie Heraty, Senior Program Coordinator for the Duke Forest, shows students how to identify little heartleaf (Hexastylis minor) during a Duke Spring Breakthrough program in 2024. Photo credit Bill Snead, Duke University Communications.
For a few lucky people at Duke, a typical work day might include a walk in the woods. Take Maggie Heraty of the Duke Forest, for instance.
What is your job position?
As senior program coordinator for the Duke Forest, Heraty is involved in many projects. She manages two volunteer programs: the Herpetofauna Community Science Program, which collects data on reptile and amphibian populations, and the Forest Stewards Program, which divides volunteers into small teams to “monitor for the effects of recreation in the Duke Forest.”
Heraty is also involved with community engagement and leading tours, such as the annual tour of the Shepherd Nature Trail — which she describes as “one of our ‘core’ tour offerings” — along with a few other themed tours focused on flora and fauna, for instance, or a research tour about ongoing studies occurring in the Duke Forest. “Essentially,” Heraty says, “every season of the year we try to lead one tour… that’s just a free and open to the public tour.”
She also leads field trips or tours by request, such as for middle school programs, specific college classes, or Duke orientation groups.
What is your job like?
“Two weeks never look the same,” Heraty says. This week, she spent Monday and Tuesday wrapping up a Data+ project she’d been involved with this summer. Data+ is an interdisciplinary summer research program for undergraduate and graduate students. On Wednesday Heraty had a staff meeting and a meeting with the Nasher Museum of Art. The Duke Forest and the Nasher are planning a collaborative event focused on the Anthropocene to coincide with an upcoming exhibit at the Nasher called Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene. Later in the week Heraty would be reviewing reports from Forest Steward volunteers, and if time allowed, she would spend rest the of the week either quality controlling data from the herpetology project, helping update the strategic plan for the Duke Forest, or completing tasks for coordinating the Forest’s deer herd reduction program.
What is the deer herd reduction program?
Every year, from September to December, the Duke Forest partners with a select group of skilled hunters to reduce its overabundant white-tailed deer population. Historically, predators like mountain lions, black bears, and wolves kept the deer population in check, but “Humans have killed off all of the top predators in our ecosystem.”
“We now have coyotes who are making their way into this area and are kind of filling that niche a little bit,” Heraty says, but not enough to control an exploding deer population. The hunting program is a way to reduce it to healthier levels in the absence of natural predators.
Disease spreads more rapidly when the density of an animal population is too high, and the resources in an environment can only sustain a certain number of deer. Maintaining a more balanced deer population also supports plant diversity in the forest since having too many deer can decimate plants and slow forest regeneration.
What is the Duke Forest for?
The Duke Forest consists of 7100 acres in Durham, Orange, and Alamance Counties. It is managed by a staff of nine people, often along with a student intern or assistant. “We have a small, very dedicated team,” Heraty says.
The Forest was founded in 1931 and “has always been intricately linked with the university itself.” The primary mission of the Duke Forest is as a teaching and research laboratory in a “natural environment that is conserved and managed sustainably and that people can study.” Recreation and conservation are an “ancillary benefit,” but the Duke Forest is “not like your average state park or land conservancy.” Teaching and research are at the forefront of what the Duke Forest is for.
Researchers conduct many studies in the Duke Forest. Studies can be scientific, such as evaluating impacts of climate change or humans on the forest, but there are also studies on history, art, and engineering.
Heraty with the 2024 Duke Forest Herpetofauna Data+ team, showing off their project work. (Data+ teammates from left to right: postdoctoral research associate Sarah Roberts, PhD student Caroline Rowley, undergraduate student Harssh Golechha, Professor Nicki Cagle, and graduate student Qianyu Zhu). Photo credit Duke Forest staff; caption provided by Heraty.
How can people use the Duke Forest responsibly?
Balancing recreational use with the other missions can present challenges. The Forest Stewards volunteer program that Heraty oversees was created to help understand and address those issues. “The impetus for [the Forest Stewards program] was in the pandemic,” Heraty says, when people tended to “flock to outdoor spaces to get… a respite from quarantine.” That created a “huge uptick” in recreational use of the Duke Forest, which can have detrimental effects on land and ecosystems. The Forest Stewards act as “ambassadors” for the Forest and serve as “more eyes on the ground,” helping to notice and report issues like fallen signs or unauthorized trails.
Heraty says some of those unauthorized trails are established when people unknowingly follow incorrect directions on a hiking app. More people have started using apps like AllTrails and Strava, which can help people find and navigate new trails but can also lead to problems if someone follows an unauthorized trail while using the apps. Other users of the same app can then follow the same route.
To use the forest responsibly and avoid unauthorized trails or sensitive research sites, Heraty encourages visitors to refer to official websites and maps, which can both help you avoid getting lost and offer resources that “allow you to build more of a connection to the place that you’re visiting.” She suggests a free app called Avenza that lets you upload official Duke Forest maps ahead of time.
How does the Duke Forest balance the impacts of recreation with its other missions?
The Duke Forest encourages sustainable recreation while prioritizing research and conservation. “There’s always something intense happening in the world, and so going outside can be a respite for people, but also—sometimes there is a consumer mindset that happens there, where it’s just like, ‘I need to get in and get out… and never think about it again,’” Heraty says. “A culture that we’re interested in… instilling… is one where we all feel an actual connection to the land we’re living on.”
“Especially in our urbanizing and developing world… it’s really special that this place is preserved,” Heraty adds, and “engaging people in that stewardship mission is important.”
Heraty leads orientation training for Herpetofauna of the Duke Forest community scientist volunteers. Photo credit Duke Forest staff.
What is your favorite thing about the forest, or something that might surprise us?
“The things I’m constantly amazed by in my job are really when I get to interact with teachers or researchers,” Heraty says. There are “so many brilliant people who are learning and thinking about the land or the forest.” One study that’s happened since Heraty joined the Duke Forest staff in 2021 was a UNC archaeological dig along New Hope Creek studying indigenous life. You can learn more about this research project in this article or this video.
Heraty also enjoys education and outreach, especially outside in the forest itself. Part of her background is in on-the-ground conservation stewardship, so “whenever I do get to actually be in the woods in Duke Forest, that is one of my favorite parts.” She enjoys helping to “interpret what people are seeing,” like explaining that a piece of flagging tape represents a research study or showing someone how to identify a tree.
What do you do for fun outside of work?
“I love reading sci-fi and fantasy,” Heraty says. Right now she’s reading a book called “Black Sun” by Rebecca Roanhorse, which a friend recommended. She is also involved with grassroots organizing for social justice groups and enjoys indoor rock-climbing.
It sounds fantastical, but it’s a reality for the scientists who work at the world’s largest particle collider:
In an underground tunnel some 350 feet beneath the France–Switzerland border, a huge device called the Large Hadron Collider sends beams of protons smashing into each other at nearly the speed of light, creating tiny eruptions that mimic the conditions that existed immediately after the Big Bang.
Scientists like Duke physicist Ashutosh Kotwal think the subatomic debris of these collisions could contain hints of the universe’s “missing matter.” And with some help from artificial intelligence, Kotwal hopes to catch these fleeting clues on camera.
A view inside the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Akin to a giant digital camera, physicists hope to use the detector in the quest to find dark matter, the mysterious stuff that fills the universe but no one has ever seen it. Credit: CERN.
Ordinary matter — the stuff of people and planets — is only part of what’s out there. Kotwal and others are hunting for dark matter, an invisible matter that’s five times more abundant than the stuff we can see but whose nature remains a mystery.
Scientists know it exists from its gravitational influence on stars and galaxies, but other than that we don’t know much about it.
The Large Hadron Collider could change that. There, researchers are looking for dark matter and other mysteries using detectors that act like giant 3D digital cameras, taking continuous snapshots of the spray of particles produced by each proton-proton collision.
Only ordinary particles trigger a detector’s sensors. If researchers can make dark matter at the LHC, scientists think one way it could be noticeable is as a sort of disappearing act: heavy charged particles that travel a certain distance — 10 inches or so — from the point of collision and then decay invisibly into dark matter particles without leaving a trace.
If you retraced the paths of these particles, they would leave a telltale “disappearing track” that vanishes partway through the detector’s inner layers.
When beams collide at the Large Hadron Collider, they split into thousands of smaller particles that fly out in all directions before vanishing. Scientists think some of those particles could make up dark matter, and Duke physicist Ashutosh Kotwal is using AI and image recognition to help in the hunt. Credit: Pcharito.
But to spot these elusive tracks they’ll need to act fast, Kotwal says.
That’s because the LHC’s detectors take some 40 million snapshots of flying particles every second.
That’s too much raw data to hang on to everything and most of it isn’t very interesting. Kotwal is looking for a needle in a haystack.
“Most of these images don’t have the special signatures we’re looking for,” Kotwal said. “Maybe one in a million is one that we want to save.”
Researchers have just a few millionths of a second to determine if a particular collision is of interest and store it for later analysis.
“To do that in real time, and for months on end, would require an image recognition technique that can run at least 100 times faster than anything particle physicists have ever been able to do,” Kotwal said.
Kotwal thinks he may have a solution. He has been developing something called a “track trigger,” a fast algorithm that is able to spot and flag these fleeting tracks before the next collision occurs, and from among a cloud of tens of thousands of other data points measured at the same time.
Ashutosh Kotwal is the Fritz London Distinguished Professor of Physics at Duke University.
His design works by divvying up the task of analyzing each image among a large number of AI engines running simultaneously, built directly onto a silicon chip. The method processes an image in less than 250 nanoseconds, automatically weeding out the uninteresting ones.
Kotwal first described the approach in a sequence of two papers published in 2020 and 2021. In a more recent paper published this May in Scientific Reports, he and a team of undergraduate student co-authors show that his algorithm can run on a silicon chip.
Kotwal and his students plan to build a prototype of their device by next summer, though it will be another three or four years before the full device — which will consist of about 2000 chips — can be installed at detectors at the LHC.
As the performance of the accelerator continues to crank up, it will produce even more particles. And Kotwal’s device could help make sure that, if dark matter is hiding among them, scientists won’t miss it.
“Our job is to ensure that if dark matter production is happening, then our technology is up to snuff to catch it in the act,” Kotwal said.
Standing out in a crowd of competitors is no easy task. But one Duke team has done just that — in math.
The Blue Devils were the only U.S.-based team to claim a top 25 finish at the 40th annual Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), beating out more than 18,500 other teams from 20 countries.
Blue Devils Brandon Lu, Benny Sun and Chris Kan (L to R) finished in the top 25 out of 18,525 teams in an international math contest called Mathematical Contest in Modeling.
The team consisted of undergraduates Christopher Kan, Benny Sun, and Brandon Lu. Their task: to solve a real-world problem using mathematical modeling within 96 hours.
This year’s contestants tackled problems ranging from analyzing what gives tennis players an edge at Wimbledon, to optimizing search and rescue operations for missing submersibles.
The Duke team tackled a challenge that has vexed the fishing industry in the Great Lakes: predicting the impact of an invasive parasitic fish called the sea lamprey that can wreak havoc on native fish.
By adapting existing models from biology and biochemistry to model the sea lamprey population, the students were able to determine how to best apply treatments to rid streams of these parasites.
Two sea lampreys chewing their way into the flesh of a native lake trout of the Great Lakes. (Great Lakes Fisheries Commission)
The contest “is much more open-ended and creatively-focused than most STEM classes,” said Sun, a mathematics and computer science double major at Duke.
The participants try out different approaches to modeling the problems, and there is no one correct answer.
Sun, Kan and Lu also received the Mathematical Association of America Award for their paper. “They did a great job,” said team advisor Veronica Ciocanel, an assistant professor of math and biology who also co-organizes a local version of the contest each fall, called the Triangle Competition in Math Modeling.
In these contests, creativity, time management and writing skills are just as important as cramming on concepts.
“We realized that communication was as important as the findings themselves,” Sun said. “We spent the last two days primarily focused on writing a good paper.”
Having fun as a team is important too, Sun said. “Team chemistry can be an especially important factor in success when you are all locked in the same room for the weekend.”
From tiny flies, Duke researchers are finding new clues to how the brain sets up its circuitry.
In her time at Duke, Khanh Vien figures she’s dissected close to 10,000 fly brains. For her PhD she spent up to eight hours each day peering at baby flies under the microscope, teasing out tiny brains a fraction the size of a poppy seed.
“I find it very meditative,” she said.
Vien acknowledges that, to most people, fruit flies are little more than a kitchen nuisance; something to swat away. But to researchers like her, they hold clues to how animal brains — including our own — are built.
While the human brain has some 86 billion neurons, a baby fruit fly’s brain has a mere 3016 — making it millions of times simpler. Those neurons talk to each other via long wire-like extensions, called axons, that relay electrical and chemical signals from one cell to the next.
Vien and other researchers in Professor Pelin Volkan’s lab at Duke are interested in how that wiring gets established during the fly’s development.
By analyzing a subset of neurons responsible for the fly’s sense of smell, the researchers have identified a protein that helps ensure that new neurons extend their axons to the correct spots in the olfactory area of the young fly’s brain and not elsewhere.
Because the same protein is found across the animal kingdom, including humans, the researchers say the work could ultimately shed light on what goes awry within the brains of people living with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
Their findings are published in the journal iScience.
Khanh Vien earned her PhD in developmental and stem cell biology in Professor Pelin Volkan’s lab at Duke.
You are looking at a field of fluffy, golden grass dotted with yellow flowers. There are trees in the background and mountains beyond that. Where are you?
Now you’re facing a terracotta sarcophagus. Where are you? When are you?
A new exhibit in the Rubenstein Arts Center uses AI to bring viewers into ancient Roman and Etruscan landscapes spanning 1300 years, from about 1000 BCE to 300 CE. (The field is Roman, the sarcophagus Etruscan.)
An AI-generated image of a summer meadow near Vulci (Viterbo, Italy). Preserved pollen evidence has revealed which plant species dominated these landscapes, and the prompts used to generate images like this one include lists of plant species.
Along one wall, screens show springtime landscapes representing ancient Rome. The written prompts AI used to create each image include detailed information on plant species found in each landscape. One titled “Sedges in shallow water of an ephemeral pond” mentions “sparse trees of alder (Alnus glutinosa), white willow (Salix alba), and white poplar (Populus alba), and few herbaceous plants.” You can view examples of the written prompts on the exhibit’s website, AI Landscapes – Rethinking the Past.
Models of pollen grains from different plant species. Real pollen grains are microscopic, but these magnified representations help show how different their shapes can be.
Historians know what plants were likely to be in these landscapes because of evidence from preserved pollen grains. Different species have distinct pollen shapes, which makes it possible to identify plants even centuries or millennia later.
Part of the exhibit uses AI and a camera to turn interactive prompts into ancient Roman scenes.
An interactive display near the front of the room has a camera pointed at props like building models, pillars, toy horses, and pieces of styrofoam. An AI model reinterprets the camera’s images to create hypothetical scenes from ancient Rome. “See how the columns get reinterpreted as statues?” says Felipe Infante de Castro, who helped program the AI. The AI attempts to add detail and backgrounds to simple props to create realistic scenes. “The only thing that we’re forcing,” he says, “are essentially shapes—which it may or may not respect.” It may reinterpret a hand as a horse’s head, for instance, or a strangely shaped building.
The model is more precise with plants than buildings, says Augustus Wendell, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Art, Art History and Visual Studies and one of the exhibit designers. Latin names for plants are widely used in modern taxonomy, and the AI is likely to have encountered more plants in its training than ancient Roman architecture styles. The AI is a “generic model” asked to “draw on its presuppositions” about Roman buildings, says Felipe. It “wasn’t trained on specifically Roman landscapes…. It just tries its best to interpret it as such.” The results aren’t always completely authentic. “In the background,” Wendell says, “the city is often quite modern Tuscan, not at all ancient Roman.”
It’s interesting to see how the AI responds when you place unfamiliar objects in front of the camera, like your hand. Here, it tried to turn my hand into some sort of building.
“We can use an AI,” Felipe says, “to give us a representation of the past that is compatible with what we believe the past should look like.”
In another part of the exhibit, you can use an AI chatbot to talk to Pliny the Elder, a Roman scholar. Caitlin Childers, who helped design the exhibit, explains that the chatbot was trained on Pliny the Elder’s 37 books on natural history. When I asked Pliny what the chatbot was designed for, he told me, “I do not have the ability to access external articles or specific information beyond the knowledge I possess as Pliny the Elder up to the year 79 AD.”
He can give you information on plants and their uses in ancient Rome, but when I asked Pliny what his favorite plant was, he couldn’t decide. “I find it challenging to select a favorite plant among the vast array of flora that the Earth provides. Each plant contributes uniquely to the balance and beauty of nature.” According to Professor Maurizio Forte, “This AI chatbot can speak in English, French, Italian and also in Latin! So it is possible to formulate questions in Latin and requiring a response in Latin or ask a question in English and expect a reply in Latin as well.”
A virtual reality headset lets you see a three-dimensional model of an Etruscan sarcophagus. The real sarcophagus is encased in glass in the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome, but the virtual reality experience puts it right in front of you. The experimental VR-AI installation also allows viewers to ask questions to the sarcophagus out loud. The sarcophagus has a statue of a man and woman, but historians don’t know whose ashes are buried inside. “It’s not important how they look,” says Forte. “It’s important how they want to be.”
The sarcophagus would have been a “symbolic, aristocratic way to show power,” Forte explains. The design of the sarcophagus represents an intentional choice about how its owners wanted the world to see them after their death. “This is eternity,” Forte says. “This is forever.”
A display of quotes at the “Rethinking the Past” exhibit.
The exhibit, called “Rethinking the Past,” is on display at the Rubenstein Arts Center until May 24.
Two of the buildings at Bennett Place, a preserved family farm in Durham known largely for its role in a Civil War surrender. Kalei Porter, a Duke Liberal Studies graduate student, recently led an event focusing on the natural history and land use of Bennett Place over time.
Bennett Place, a North Carolina State Historic Site in Durham, is known for its role in a Civil War surrender, but a recent event focusing on the site’s natural history sought to broaden that story. Kalei Porter, a Graduate Liberal Studies student at Duke, led the event, which focused on changing land use at Bennett Place over time.
Jim Barrett, a volunteer tour guide, led a tour of Bennett Place focused on the more well known parts of its history. “The Civil War was a series of five military surrenders,” he explains. The first occurred in Appomattox Court House in Virginia, but while that marked a symbolic end to the war, technically only the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia surrendered there. Another surrender meeting occurred on the land now known as Bennett Place, where Union General Sherman and Confederate General Johnston met at the Bennett family’s small farm to discuss their terms of surrender.
That meeting ultimately led to the preservation of the farm as a historic site, but the history of Bennett Place “should not be an exclusive Civil War story,” Porter says. She has a degree in environmental biology, and her work at Bennett Place combines her interests in ecology and history.
For the past two academic years, Porter has been involved with the North Carolina Lives and Legacies Project, which uses research to tell more nuanced, inclusive stories about land use at sites like Bennett Place. The project, which is based in Duke’s Information Science + Studies, has also received support from Bass Connections in the Vice Provost’s Office for Interdisciplinary Studies and Duke University Libraries. This summer, Kalei will continue her research as a Graduate Project Manager in a History+ team.
James Bennett and his family were small-scale, yeoman farmers. They had about 200 acres, Porter says, “sustaining four to ten people.” They grew most of their own food and sold handmade clothing and crops like watermelons and vegetables at a local market, Barrett says. The site was preserved by civil leaders, including one of Washington Duke’s sons, according to Barrett. The original house was destroyed in a fire in 1921 but was rebuilt in 1962 with material from a similar house, Porter explains. On Barrett’s tour, he mentioned that Sherman brought an illustrator to the surrender meeting, and the pictures from that day still exist, so we know what the house originally looked like. The new house was rebuilt to resemble the old one.
Porter’s event included a display of plants from Duke’s herbarium. The dried plants she chose were collected in North Carolina in different decades, preserving important information about flowering time and native flora in specific sites. “You have a little slice of spring from as far back as the 30’s,” Porter says about the plants she chose.
Plants from Duke’s herbarium were on display at the event. Specimens like these can preserve important information like what time of year plants were flowering in different decades.
The exhibit at the event includes other items, too, like a list of who has used this land at different points in history. Before 1782, according to a sign at the event, several Native American tribes inhabited the area, including the Seponi, Cheraw, Catawba, Lumbee, Occaneechi, and Shakori. In 1782, Jacob Baldwin purchased the land, and it changed hands at least twice again before James Bennett bought it in 1846.
There is also a detailed soil map from 1920 on display. Such surveys can make farming more profitable since different crops do best in different soil conditions. Porter says the first geological survey in North Carolina was conducted in the 1850s, making North Carolina only the third state—and the first state in the South—to do soil surveys.
Porter has been working on transcribing Bennett’s ledger papers, which she describes as “a cross between a diary, a planner, and a credit card log.” They provide a record of daily life for a small farmer in North Carolina. Porter says Bennett made a lot of notes about fixing his tools.
Later in the day, Porter led a tour of the site with a focus on natural history. We start on a path lined with fences. Historically, it was a road that went from Raleigh to Hillsborough, and it also “roughly lines up with some of the Native American trading routes that predated the property,” Porter says.
The Unity Monument at Bennett Place. The monument was built in the 1920s, and its original meaning isn’t entirely clear.
We stop at the Unity monument, built in the 1920s soon after the Bennett house burned down. Robert Buerglener, Research Associate, Duke Information Science + Studies, explained to me earlier that the Unity monument may have survived because its meaning is more ambiguous than many Confederate monuments. Porter says the monument incorporated stone from the North, West, and South to represent the theme of unity.
We tour the house and separate kitchen. Both give glimpses into the lives of the Bennett Family. A ladle made from a dried gourd. Jars of persimmon seeds and other items that, according to Barrett, were used as wartime replacements for more typical ingredients. Wood siding on the house that Porter says dates from the 1850s.
It’s not just the buildings that reveal the story of this land. Porter points out trees, shrubs, and fences as well.
Before the Civil War, she says, livestock here roamed free. Buildings and gardens would have been fenced to keep the livestock out. After the war, however, fencing became more expensive, and people started creating fences around the livestock instead and building cheaper, less sturdy fences.
As we walk toward a nature trail at the back of the property, Porter draws our attention to the pine trees. Both loblolly and shortleaf pines grow here. Historically, shortleaf would have been more common in this area, but places that have been recently managed for timber tend to have loblolly. Most of these pines are still relatively young; they were not here when the Bennetts lived on this land.
In the forest, many of the low-growing plants we pass are species of blueberry. Porter has searched through digitized North Carolina newspapers for records of the word “blueberry.” It was first mentioned in the 1880s as a verb, blueberrying (women going out to pick wild blueberries) but wasn’t grown commercially in this area until the 1930s.
Porter ends her tour by asking us to look at the sky. Even the sky could have changed in the centuries since the Bennetts farmed this land. Today it’s clear and blue, but modern pollution could make it less blue than it used to be, Porter says, and some days we might see airplane contrails, which the Bennetts would never have seen back then. “Sometimes the sky is even asynchronous with time,” Porter says.
This February, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments challenging laws in Florida and Texas that would regulate how social media companies like Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) control what posts can appear on their sites.
Given the legal challenges involved over the concerns of the role social media plays in creating polarization, there is a need for further research to explore the issue. Enter Duke’s Polarization Lab, a multidisciplinary research hub designed to explore and mitigate the societal effects of online engagement.
In an April 17 seminar, Polarization Lab postdoc Max Allamong delved into the workings and discoveries of this innovative lab, which brings together experts from seven disciplines and various career stages, supported by twelve funders and partners, including five UNC affiliates.
Duke postdoctoral associate Max Allamong
Unless you’re okay with people stealing your data for their own research, conducting studies based on social media is next to impossible, Allamong explained.
In their attempt to conduct research ethically, the lab has developed a tool called “Discussit.” This platform enables users to see the partisanship of people they are communicating with online, aiming to reduce polarization by fostering dialogue across political divides. To put it simply, they’ll know if they’re talking to someone from the left or if they’re talking to someone from the right. Building on this, Allamong also introduced “Spark Social,” a social media simulator where researchers can adjust variables to study interactions under controlled conditions. This system not only allows for the modification of user interactions but also employs large language models (like those used in ChatGPT) to simulate realistic conversations.
Allamong highlighted a particularly revealing study from the lab, titled “Outnumbered Online,” which examined how individuals behave in partisan echo chambers versus balanced environments. The study placed users in forums where they were either in the majority or minority in terms of political alignment, revealing that being outnumbered led to increased self-censorship and perceptions of a toxic environment.
The lab’s ongoing work also explores the broader implications of polarization on political engagement. By manipulating the type of content users see, researchers are examining variables like believability and replicability of data generated by AI. This approach not only contributes to academic knowledge but also has practical implications for designing healthier online spaces.
As social media continues to shape political and social discourse, the work of Duke’s Polarization Lab and Allamong serves as a safe space to conduct ethical and meaningful research. The insights gained here will better equip us to analyze the polarization created by social media companies, and how that affects the political landscape of the country. The longstanding questions of the effects of echo chambers may soon be answered. This research will undoubtedly influence how we engage with and understand the digital world around us, making it a crucial endeavour for fostering a more informed and less polarized society.
The COVID-19 pandemic sometimes feels like a problem we mostly dealt with yesterday, not one we’re still facing today. However, Duke medical anthropologist Harris Solomon had a different story to tell in the Trent Humanities in Medicine Lecture on April 9.
Harris Solomon. Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University
During the height of the pandemic, hospitals morphed into war zones where the frontlines became the ICU rooms. Like never before, these rooms became a no-man’s-land that few others would cross. A separation was born.
This separation, however, was beyond a physical space; it was a delineation of roles and responsibilities. Nurses often found themselves acting as intermediaries between the patient and the external healthcare team, prompting a sense of isolation and moral burden. They wrestled with their fears in solitary confinement, while colleagues relayed instructions over walkie-talkies—a stark contrast to the collaborative nature of pre-pandemic medicine. Protocols that were once straightforward now needed a touch of ‘MacGyvering,’ with clinicians making do with what was available.
The rigidity of clinical trials also faced challenges; the blinding of studies was questioned as lifesaving drugs teetered on the edge of accessibility. Solomon gave an example of what this change looked like in real life. A patient was due to be treated, and they said that they didn’t care about the details. Even if it was a placebo, they were fine with it. While he didn’t go into the specifics of what had happened, he used this story to accentuate the disparity between evidence and treatment. People don’t care about the treatment as much as they used to.
“We make decisions like we never did before. We summon the need to accept uncertainty”, Solomon said.
As the crisis was evolving, and the world was recovering from the aftermath of COVID, the fabric of healthcare work found itself to be changed forever. Processes and practices that were once considered to be stable, are now brought under a microscope in a post-pandemic world.
The pandemic has indeed been a catalyst for change, but is this change good? While there is no black-and-white answer, I left the room feeling a bit uncomfortable. Although the pandemic has prompted a reevaluation of the health care system, have we innovated, or have we just found shortcuts?
More than 40 years since its signing, the United States still has not ratified an international agreement known as the “constitution of the oceans.” In a webinar held April 2, two of the world’s leading ocean diplomacy scholars met to discuss its history, challenges, and the U.S.’s potential role in the future.
The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea was truly revolutionary for its time. Unraveling against the backdrop of decades of conflict pertaining to maritime affairs, the significance of this conference and its attempts at negotiating a comprehensive legal framework cannot be understated. Key figures in this development include the members of the United Nations, coastal and landlocked states, the scientific community, environmental community, and developing nations. Yet, with the conclusion of this unifying conference, a singular question remained: What comes next?
This question is what David Balton, the executive director of the U.S. Artic Steering Committee, and David Freestone, a Professor at George Washington University and the Executive Secretary of the Sargasso Sea Commission, aimed to address in a webinar titled, “The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea at 40.” In this discussion a range of topics were discussed but the primary focus was providing viewers with a comprehensive understanding of the events of this convention and the way this history plays out in modern times.
Picture of Ambassador David Balton (Obtained from the Wilson Center)
The 1982 convention was one of multiple attempts at setting parameters and guidelines for maritime control. In 1958, the council met for the first time to discuss growing concerns regarding the need for a comprehensive legal framework regarding ocean governance. In this they brought multiple representatives worldwide to discuss the breadth of territorial waters, the rights of coastal states, freedom of navigation, and the exploitation of marine resources. This conversation laid the groundwork for future discussions. However, it was largely ineffective at generating a treaty as they were unable to reach a consensus on the breadth of territorial waters. This first conference is referred to as UNCLOS I.
Following 1958, in 1960 the members of the council and associated parties convened once again to discuss the issues brought forth by UNCLOS I. The purpose of this conference was to further discuss issues pertaining to the Law of the Sea and build a framework to begin ratification of a binding treaty to ensure that conflict regarding the sea diminishes greatly. This discussion was set in the context of the Cold War. This new setting complicated discussions as talks regarding the implementation of nuclear weapons under the deep seabed further elicited great debate and tensions. While the aim of this meeting was of course to reach a general agreement on these subjects, major differences between states and other parties prohibited UNCLOS II from producing said treaty.
UNCLOS III served as the breadwinner of this development, yet this is not to say that results were immediate. Negotiations for UNCLOS III were the longest of the three as they spanned from 1973 to 1982. UNCLOS II was particularly special due to its ability to produce revolutionary concepts such as archipelagic status and the establishment of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), granting coastal states exclusive rights over fishing and economic resources within 200 miles of their shores. In addition, this led to the development of the International Seabed Authority and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Despite the limitations and unfinished agenda that preceded this, the treaty was officially ratified in 1994 at Montego Bay. The convention initially received 157 signatories and currently holds participation from 169 parties. Absent from this group are the United States, Turkey, and Venezuela. The convention was designed to work as a package deal and required nations to fully commit to the agreement or abstain entirely. For this reason, the United States retains a nonparty, observer status despite to their adherence to the rules and guidelines of the treaty.
After this explanation, Balton and Freestone addressed the big question: What comes next? As of right now, the United States is still not a signatory of this treaty. However, this is not to say that they are in violation of this treaty either. The United States participates in discussions and negotiations related to UNCLOS issues, both within the United Nations and through bilateral and multilateral engagements. In addition, the Navy still upholds international law in dealings concerning navigational rights. The one factor many claims prohibits the United States from signing is the possibility of their sovereignty being challenged by certain provisions within the treaty. In spite of this, many continue to push to change this reality, advocating for the United States to ratify this agreement.
Picture of Professor David Freestone (Obtained from Flavia at World Maritime University)
The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea remains a pivotal moment in the history of international maritime governance. This Convention led to many insightful and necessary developments which will continue to set precedent for generations to come. While imperfect, the efforts put forth by many nations and third parties to ensure that it remains consistent with modern day times is very telling of the hopeful development of this treaty. Furthermore, while the future of U.S. involvement in the treaty is uncertain, the frameworks established by the three UNCLOS’ provide a solid foundation for addressing contemporary challenges and furthering international cooperation.
Look at the nearest window. What did you see first—the glass itself or what was on the other side? For birds, that distinction is a matter of life and death.
A dead red-eyed vireo above the entrance to the Brodhead Center at Duke. Every year, millions of birds die after colliding with windows. Buildings with lots of glass are particularly dangerous.
Every year, up to one billion birds die from hitting windows. Windows kill more birds than almost any other cause of human-related bird mortality, second only to feral and domestic cats. Both the transparency and reflectiveness of glass can confuse flying birds. They either don’t see the glass at all and try to fly through it, or they’re fooled by reflections of safe habitat or open sky. And at night, birds may be disoriented by lit-up buildings and end up hitting windows by mistake. In all cases, the result is usually the same. The majority of window collision victims die on impact. Even the survivors may die soon after from internal bleeding, concussions, broken bones, or other injuries.
Madison Chudzik, a biology Ph.D. student in the Lipshutz Lab at Duke, studies bird-window collisions and migrating birds. “Purely the fact that we’ve built buildings is killing those birds,” she says.
Every spring and fall, billions of birds in the United States alone migrate to breeding and wintering grounds. Many travel hundreds or thousands of miles. During peak migration, tens of thousands of birds may fly across Durham County in a single night. Not all of them make it.
Chudzik’s research focuses on nocturnal flight calls, which migrating birds use to communicate while they fly. Many window collision victims are nocturnal migrants lured to their deaths by windows and lights. Chudzik wants to know “how we can use nocturnal flight calls as an indicator to examine collision risks in species.”
Chudzik (back) setting up one of her recording devices on the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The devices record flight calls from birds migrating at night. Image courtesy of Chudzik.
Previous research, Chudzik says, has identified a strong correlation between the number of flight calls recorded on a given night and the overall migration intensity that night. “If sparrows have a high number of detections, there is likely a high number migrating through the area,” Chudzik explains. But some species call more than others, and there is “taxonomic bias in collision risk,” with some species that call more colliding less and vice versa. Chudzik is exploring this relationship in her research.
Unlike bird songs, nocturnal flight calls are very short. The different calls are described with technical terms like “zeep” and “seep.” Chudzik is part of a small but passionate community of people with the impressive ability to identify species by the minute differences between their flight calls. “It’s a whole other world of… language, basically,” Chudzik says.
Chudzik can identify a species not only by hearing its flight call but also by seeing its spectrogram, a visual representation of sound. This spectrogram, from a recording on Adler Planetarium, has flight calls from four species. The x-axis represents time, while the y-axis shows frequency. The brightness or intensity indicates amplitude. Image from Chudzik.
She began studying nocturnal flight calls for research she did as an undergraduate, but her current project no longer needs to rely on talented humans to identify every individual call. A deep learning model called Nighthawk, trained on a wealth of meticulous flight call data, can identify calls from their spectrograms with 95% accuracy. It is free and accessible to anyone, and much of the data it’s been trained on comes from non-scientists, such as submissions from a Facebook community devoted to nocturnal flight calls. Chudzik estimates that perhaps a quarter of the people on that Facebook page are researchers. “The rest,” she says, “are people who somehow stumbled upon it and… fell in love with nocturnal flight calling.”
In addition to studying nocturnal flight calls, Chudzik’s research will investigate how topography, like Lake Michigan by Chicago, affects migration routes and behavior and how weather affects flight calls. Birds seem to communicate more during inclement weather, and bad weather sometimes triggers major collision events. Last fall in Chicago, collisions with a single building killed hundreds of migratory birds in one night.
Chudzik had a recorder on that building. It had turned off before the peak of the collision event, but the flight call recordings from that night are still staggering. In one 40-second clip, there were 300 flight calls identified. Normally, Chudzik says, she might expect a maximum of about seven in that time period.
Nights like these, with enormous numbers of migrants navigating the skies, can be especially deadly. Fortunately, solutions exist. The problem often lies in convincing people to use them. There are misconceptions that extreme changes are required to protect birds from window collisions, but simple solutions can make a huge difference. “We’re not telling you to tear down that building,” Chudzik says. “There are so many tools to stop this from happening that… the argument of ‘well, it’s too expensive, I don’t want to do it…’ is just thrown out the window.”
A yellow-bellied sapsucker collision casualty in front of the French Family Science Center last year.
What can individuals and institutions do to prevent bird-window collisions?
Turn off lights at night.
For reasons not completely understood, birds flying at night are attracted to lit-up urban areas, and lights left on at night can become a death trap. Though window collisions are a year-round problem, migration nights can lead to high numbers of victims, and turning off non-essential lights can help significantly. One study on the same Chicago building where last year’s mass collision event occurred found that halving lighted windows during migration could reduce bird-window collisions by more than 50%.
Chudzik is struck by “the fact that this is such a big conservation issue, but it literally just takes a flip of a switch.” BirdCast and Audubon suggest taking actions like minimizing indoor and outdoor lights at night during spring and fall migration, keeping essential outdoor lights pointed down and adding motion sensors to reduce their use, and drawing blinds to help keep light from leaking out.
Use window decals and other bird-friendly glass treatments.
There are many products and DIY solutions intended to make windows safer for birds, like window decals, external screens, patterns of dots or lines, and strings hanging in front of a window at regular intervals. For window treatments to be most effective, they should be applied to the exterior of the glass, and any patterning should be no more than two inches apart vertically and horizontally. This helps protect even the smallest birds, like kinglets and hummingbirds.
It can be hard to see from a distance, but these windows on Duke’s Fitzpatrick Center have been retrofitted with tiny white dots, an effective strategy to reduce bird-window collisions.
A 2016 window collision study at Duke conducted by several scientists, including Duke Professor Nicolette Cagle, Ph.D., identified the Fitzpatrick Center as a window collision hotspot. As a result, Duke retrofitted some of the building’s most dangerous windows with bird-friendly dot patterning. Ongoing collision monitoring has revealed about a 70% reduction in collisions for that building since the dots were added.
One obstacle to widespread use of bird-friendly design practices and window treatments is concerns about aesthetics. But bird-friendly windows can be aesthetically pleasing, too, and “Dead birds hurt your aesthetic anyway.”
If nothing else, don’t clean your windows.
Bird-window collisions don’t just happen in cities and on university campuses. In fact, most fatal collisions involve houses and other buildings less than four stories tall. Window treatments like the dots on the Fitzpatrick building can be costly for homeowners, but anything you can put on the outside of a window will help.
“Don’t clean your windows,” Chudzik suggests—smudges may also help birds recognize the glass as a barrier.
Window collisions at Duke
The best thing Duke could do, Chudzik says, is to be open to treating more windows. Every spring, students in Cagle’s Wildlife Surveys class, which I am taking now, collect data on window collision victims found around several buildings on campus. Meanwhile, a citizen science iNaturalist project collects records of dead birds seen by anyone at campus. If you find a dead bird near a window at Duke, you can help by submitting it to the Bird-window collisions project on iNaturalist. Part of the goal is to identify window collision hotspots in order to advocate for more window treatments like the dots on the Fitzpatrick Center.
Spring migration is happening now. BirdCast’s modeling tools estimate that 260,000 birds crossed Durham County last night. They are all protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. However, Chudzik says, “We haven’t thought to protect them while they’re actually migrating.” The law is intended to protect species that migrate, but “it’s not saying ‘while you are migrating you have more protections,’” Chudzik explains. Some have argued that it should, however, suggesting that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act should mandate safer windows to help protect migrants while they’re actually migrating.
“This whole world comes alive while we’re asleep, and… most people have no idea,” Chudzik says about nocturnal flight calls. She is shown here on Northwestern University, one of the Chicago buildings where she has placed recorders for her research. Photo courtesy of Chudzik.
We can’t protect every bird that passes overhead at night, but by making our buildings safer, we can all help more birds get one step closer to where they need to go.
In a society where it seems like the power to create meaningful change on climate concerns is concentrated in the hands of few, witnessing the youth attempt to counter this dynamic is always inspiring.
Last week, members of Duke University’s Climate and Sustainability Office convened with students for a town hall meeting to discuss current progress, areas for improvement, and aspirations for the future. During this meeting, great emphasis was placed on the opinions and perspectives of students, as the leaders of the Duke climate commitment recognized the importance of their voices within this process.
The meeting began with two thought-provoking questions by Toddi Steelman, Vice President and Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability, and Tavey Capps, Executive Director of Climate and Sustainability and Sustainable Duke: “What is one word to describe your feelings towards climate change, and what energizes you about climate change?”
These two questions immediately brought the room to life as students began to express their climate anxiety, fears, and frustrations, alongside the ways in which they hoped to one day see change. This passionate discussion set the stage for a deep dive into the objectives and goals of Duke’s Climate Commitment.
L to R: Toddi Steelman and Tavey Capps
The Climate Commitment is a university-wide effort aimed at creating initiatives to correct our current climate crisis by creating a sustainable environment for all.
Within the commitment, there are five areas of focus: Research, Education, External Engagement, Operations, and Community Connections. The research sector is focused on connecting Duke’s schools across the board for interdisciplinary research. Education is geared towards ensuring learning occurs in and beyond the classroom. External Engagement focuses on informing policy and decision makers alongside engaging community members within this mission. Operations studies the food, water, waste, energy, and carbon supply chain on campus. Lastly, Community Connections asks: how do we authentically engage with the community and partners alike?
This commitment serves as a broad scale invitation for everyone to get involved, and Duke students did not hesitate to take advantage of this invitation. The town hall was organized through breakout rooms for the students to collectively share ideas.
The first breakout room was focused on the idea of communication. In this, students discussed the ways that they felt the commitment could best reach their peers on campus. Some proposed utilizing the popular social media platform, TikTok by creating short eye-catching videos. Others discussed using professors, posters, and BC Plaza to ensure engagement. Most agreed that email listservs and newsletters also held some merit in getting their classmate’s attention.
Above all, students came to the consensus that informing the student body would be one of the most important missions of the Climate Commitment.
Following the communication session, I attended the research breakout room led by Blake Tedder from the Office of Sustainability and formerly the Director of Engagement at the Duke Forest. He asked again about the most pressing climate issue. From this, many students delved into issues surrounding biodiversity financing, carbon offsetting, access to clean water, and the ways climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities.
Blake Tedder leading the Research Breakout Room.
Conversation about these concerns quickly bled into issues surrounding the larger prospect of interdisciplinary studies. Many students felt that this was best done through Duke’s RESILE initiative (Risk Science for Climate Resilience), Bass Connections, and even greater connection between Duke’s main campus and its Kunshan Campus.
The final room I attended was geared towards making the fight against climate change one that is inclusive and diverse. This talk was coordinated by Jason Elliot from Sustainable Duke.
The question that guided the discussion was: “How can we ensure our goals do not come at the expense of the community?” To this, students proposed a range of ideas. Chief among these were becoming more in tune with the needs of the community and finding ways to actively attend local farms, and other places in need.
Jason Elliot leading the Justice, Diversity, and Equity Inclusion Breakout Room.
In addition, many suggested diversifying speakers to ensure representation and voices from all parts of the community. Some students even narrowed in on engagement within our own campus, suggesting greater collaboration among groups such as the Climate Coalition, Keep Durham Beautiful, and Alpha Phi Omega to achieve these goals.
This town hall was simply one of many future engagements expected from Duke’s Climate Commitment in the coming years. While there is still much more work to be done, the diligent efforts of students and faculty alike make the future look promising in the fight against Climate Change.
For some people, the word “rainforest” conjures up vague notions of teeming jungles. But Camille DeSisto sees something more specific: a complex interdependent web.
For the past few years, the Duke graduate student has been part of a community-driven study exploring the relationships between people, plants and lemurs in a rainforest in northern Madagascar, where the health of one species depends on the health of others.
Many lemurs, for example, eat the fruits of forest trees and deposit their seeds far and wide in their droppings, thus helping the plants spread. People, in turn, depend on the plants for things like food, shelter and medicines.
But increasingly, deforestation and other disturbances are throwing these interactions out of whack.
DeSisto and her colleagues have been working in a 750,000-acre forest corridor in northeast Madagascar known as the COMATSA that connects two national parks.
The area supports over 200 tree species and nine species of lemurs, and is home to numerous communities of people.
A red-bellied lemur (Eulemur rubriventer) in a rainforest in northeast Madagascar. Photo by Martin Braun.
“People live together with nature in this landscape,” said DeSisto, who is working toward her Ph.D. in ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment.
But logging, hunting and other stressors such as poverty and food insecurity have taken their toll.
Over the last quarter century, the area has lost 14% of its forests, mostly to make way for vanilla and rice.
This loss of wild habitats risks setting off a series of changes. Fewer trees also means fewer fruit-eating lemurs, which could create a feedback loop in which the trees that remain have fewer opportunities to replace themselves and sprout up elsewhere — a critical ability if trees are going to track climate change.
DeSisto and her colleagues are trying to better understand this web of connections as part of a larger effort to maximize forest resilience into an uncertain future.
The research requires dozens of students and researchers from universities in Madagascar and the U.S., not to mention local botanists and lemur experts, the local forest management association, and consultants and guides from nearby national parks, all working together across time zones, cultures and languages.
Forest field team members at camp (not everyone present). Photo credit: Jane Slentz-Kesler.
Together, they’ve found that scientific approaches such as fecal sampling or transect surveys can only identify so much of nature’s interconnected web.
Many lemurs are small, and only active at night or during certain times of year, which can make them hard to spot — especially for researchers who may only be on the ground for a limited time.
To fill the gaps, they’re also conducting interviews with local community members who have accumulated knowledge from a lifetime of living on the land, such as which lemurs like to munch on certain plants, what parts they prefer, and whether people rely on them for food or other uses.
By integrating different kinds of skills and expertise, the team has been able to map hidden connections between species that more traditional scientific methods miss.
For example, learning from the expertise of local community members helped them understand that forest patches that are regenerating after clear-cutting attract nocturnal lemurs that may — depending on which fruits they like to eat — promote the forest’s regrowth.
Camille DeSisto after a successful morning collecting lemur fecal samples.
Research collaborations aren’t unusual in science. But DeSisto says that building collaborations with colleagues more than 9,000 miles away from where she lives poses unique challenges.
Just getting to her field site involves four flights, several bumpy car rides, climbing steep trails and crossing slippery logs.
“Language barriers are definitely a challenge too,” DeSisto said.
She’s been studying Malagasy for seven years, but the language’s 18 dialects can make it hard to follow every joke her colleagues tell around the campfire.
To keep her language skills sharp she goes to weekly tutoring sessions when she’s back in the U.S., and she even helped start the first formal class on the language for Duke students.
“I like to think of it as language opportunities, not just language barriers,” DeSisto said.”
“Certain topics I can talk about with much more ease than others,” she added. “But I think making efforts to learn the language is really important.”
When they can’t have face-to-face meetings the team checks in remotely, using videoconferencing and instant messaging to agree on each step of the research pipeline, from coming up with goals and questions and collecting data to publishing their findings.
“That’s hard to navigate when we’re so far away,” DeSisto said. But, she adds, the teamwork and knowledge sharing make it worth it. “It’s the best part of research.”
This research was supported by Duke Bass Connections (“Biocultural Sustainability in Madagascar,” co-led by James Herrera), Duke Global, The Explorers Club, Primate Conservation, Inc., Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and the Garden Club of America.
If your community relied on COVID-19 rapid tests to reopen safely during the first year of the pandemic, there’s a good chance Rajiv Shah had something to do with it. Not just for his ambition but also for his audacity to transform the nature of our response to pandemics: Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, played a crucial role in scaling up diagnostic testing for COVID-19.
He’s also the man who tackled Ebola with the Obama Administration. Back then, Shah and his team embarked on a “big bet” to deploy 2,500 troops to fight the disease, not on the battlefield, but on the frontlines of human health. Much like the name of his 2023 book “Big Bets,” he embarked on a journey to change the world.
In a Jan. 31 talk hosted by the Duke Global Health Institute, Shah discussed his “big bet mindset” when it comes to tackling public health challenges.
Bet #1 Diagnostic Testing at Scale
For starters, what’s a big bet?
“It’s a big bet you take on the community to help young people get opportunities. Often, when we think of charitable endeavors, we imagine that doing a little bit is beneficial because it makes us feel good. In contrast, a big endeavor means taking on something significant and engaging in the hard work necessary. It’s about going beyond just doing the best we can; this isn’t merely a charitable endeavor, it’s a strategic approach to ensure national security.” Shah explained.
Keeping true to his word, the goal was clear: administer 30 million tests per week to preempt the need for lockdowns and enable a safer, faster return to normalcy. This was not just a health initiative; it was a socio-economic strategy aimed at averting total disaster. He took a big bet, and the numbers spoke for themselves. The Rockefeller Foundation played a pivotal role in assisting schools with their reopening strategies during the pandemic. This support included the establishment of collaborative networks, the development of resources and guidelines, and the provision of expert recommendations. Now do you get why this man probably saved your life? It’s because he did!
Bet #2 A Memo for Bill Gates
It wasn’t all that easy for him though. He had his haters (don’t we all?). Perhaps the difference was, his hater was Bill Gates. But he successfully proved Gates wrong too. Thankfully, Gates and Shah are more like besties than anything now. Despite the initial dismissal of his ideas as “the stupidest thing,” Shah’s persistence and innovative thinking paved the way for a groundbreaking bond structure to fund vaccinations, ultimately saving millions of children’s lives. Shah and Gates – two greats in one room – inevitability led to the production of something good: The Vaccine Alliance. This meeting set the stage for a three-year roadmap focused on a bond structure to fund vaccinations. This initiative ultimately contributed to saving 16 million children’s lives.
The Final Bet: The Power of Experimentation.
I’ll be honest, I was intimidated walking into this room. I was in my Duke hoodie, not expecting fancy foods, and coat checks (good news: this meant they recorded his speech and uploaded it on YouTube. Check it out!).
At the heart of Shah’s philosophy is a belief in the power of experimentation and innovation. His call to “keep experimenting” embodies the spirit of resilience and creativity that is essential for tackling the world’s most daunting health challenges. Being amidst well-suited individuals while donned in a hoodie wasn’t an experiment in the scientific sense, but it was an experience that highlighted the contrast between expectations and reality, comfort zones and the unfamiliar. It served as a metaphor for the broader experiments we’re all a part of—those that push us beyond our boundaries, challenge our preconceptions, and ultimately lead to growth.
His book was called ‘Big Bets’ because the editors thought it was catchy. They were right. But this title doesn’t just grab our attention—it invites us into a world where daring to dream big and taking calculated risks can lead to monumental changes in public health and beyond.
Filmmaker Ashley Hillard and cinematographer Alan Dunkin in Yellowstone. Photo by Hillard.
“I have been interested in storytelling and the environment since my earliest memories,” says Ashley Hillard, a documentary filmmaker with an interest in wildlife management and conservation practices in the United States.
Hillard has a background in film, largely with production companies, talent agencies, and independent projects on the side, but she later shifted into climate tech recruitment. Now she is pursuing an environmental leadership Masters in Environmental Management degree at Duke while working on documentary projects. She is also a Communications Assistant Intern in the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic.
She has been working on a film called “Coexistence,” a documentary that spotlights North American species and wildlife management practices. Hillard got the idea for the project when she noticed that U.S.-based researchers often choose to study species in other countries, perhaps “because it’s easier to go over and say ‘Why don’t you try this?’ rather than having to deal with issues in your backyard.”
“We need to pay attention to our own backyards,” Hillard emphasizes. “The hope,” she says, is “more laws and policies and values change along with behaviors as we become more informed and more aware.” She also believes that “local efforts can usually go further.” Part of her goal in creating films about conservation is to help viewers realize that “individuals can be part of change.” Films and other forms of storytelling can inform people about specific species and conservation efforts, but Hillard hopes her work can help shift perspectives more broadly as well. Effective conservation is often “a social attitudes and values issue,” Hillard says. “There needs to be a shift in how we view the environment.”
An American bison that Hillard saw while filming in Yellowstone. Photo by Hillard.
Shifting baseline syndrome is the idea that people’s expectations of how nature should look reflect their own experiences rather than an accurate picture of the natural state of landscapes, flora, fauna, and wildlife abundance. Our understanding of what nature “normally” looks like changes over generations and is skewed by the societies and time periods we inhabit. The more we damage our environments, the less we collectively remember what they looked like before—and the less motivated we may be to restore them to a condition most of us can’t remember.
When humans and wildlife come into conflict, our perceptions of how nature “should” be can matter tremendously. Gray wolves were recently delisted from the Endangered Species list, then re-listed in most places—both were controversial decisions—but their numbers are far lower than they were historically. Still, some think there are too many wolves. In the Western U.S., gray wolf conservation efforts often clash with the desires of ranchers and and hunters, who may view higher wolf populations as a threat to livestock or game animals like deer and elk. But some of these hunters and ranchers, Hillard says, “are real conservationists doing amazing work,” and she thinks they should get more attention.
While creating the film, Hillard has tried to capture the complexities of wildlife conservation. It’s not as simple as “They’re bad, they’re good, and this is how we solve it,” Hillard says.
There are different ideas about how conservation efforts should be conducted and which animals should be protected in the first place. The dominant approach to wildlife management in the U.S., Hillard says, is rooted in the idea that there are “good” species that people can use and “bad” species that people don’t like to live with, such as wolves and other predators. “This perspective,” she says, “came over with colonists.” She mentions Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf; the stories we tell about animals can reflect societal attitudes toward them. Many indigenous peoples, meanwhile, have traditionally viewed all species as kin. This “cultural aspect” affects people’s willingness to coexist with species like wolves, which in turn affects our conservation practices.
In this country, very few people are killed by wildlife—about 700 annually, according to one review that counted deaths from bites, wildlife-vehicle collisions, and zoonotic diseases. Car accidents, on the other hand, are more than 60 times more deadly, killing about 43,000 people in the U.S. per year. “We have a certain acceptance of how we die,” Hillard says. “There are a number of things that kill people with much higher percentages [than deaths from wildlife] that we… accept as day-to-day,” but we don’t tend to hear calls to eliminate cars from society, while an animal that harms a human is often given a death sentence. Hillard thinks media in general should be more careful about how they share stories about wildlife, especially negative encounters. If stories focus only on rare but tragic incidents, it can distort perceptions of species and “feed into that doom loop.”
Films, Hillard says, can inspire people “to look at things differently and see things from different perspectives.” Storytelling is also a way of communicating scientific information and encouraging action. Hillard feels that some stories about environmental issues are told in a one-sided, black-and-white way, but the nuances of these problems are important. “Finding those complexities and working through them… and then trying to craft stories around that to share with the public so they can make more informed decisions” is part of the goal of Hillard’s films.
“Coexistence” focuses on well-known, often controversial species like red wolves and mountain lions. “Familiarity and awareness of a species can contribute to interest in protecting them,” Hillard says. Such species are sometimes referred to as charismatic megafauna and can be viewed as ambassadors for conservation or umbrella species whose protection helps other wildlife as well. But Hillard has concerns about the term charismatic megafauna. “It diminishes a species’s value and reduces them to ‘cute’ so you no longer see them as an intrinsic part of an ecosystem,” she says. She believes it’s important to emphasize protection of entire ecosystems, not just specific species within them.
Hillard hopes that her films inspire more awareness of and interest in environmental issues. “There’s a lot of pressure to get it right,” she says. And storytelling can have its own issues when it comes to presenting accurate information. “Information can be left out or shaped in a way to make it more compelling,” Hillard acknowledges. She feels that many wildlife films focus first on scenery and animals, then discuss conservation issues at the end. But “Coexistence” is “very much focused on the issues.” It is expected to be released by early 2025.
“I strive to tell impactful stories in creative ways that are more upbeat in tone,” Hillard says. She believes it’s important for people to be aware of the challenges facing wildlife, but she also wants to inspire hope and the belief that individual actions can matter. “To feel powerless can make you feel hopeless, and there is a lot to be hopeful for,” she says. “But there needs to be a shift in how we view the environment.”
One major problem she sees is our consumerist, materialistic society. “We’re kind of consuming ourselves off the planet,” Hillard says. “How do you change behaviors within a society that’s so hyper-consumptive?”
Films and other forms of storytelling can make scientific information more accessible. “Communicating is that bridge to getting people to care, to understand it, to learn about it,” Hillard says. “Without communication, science studies and research may be siloed in academia.” When we lack accurate and accessible information, we may rely on “‘I heard someone say something about that thing’” rather than science to inform our understanding of issues.
Along with providing accurate information, Hillard wants to encourage “a view of mutualism with other species” and raise questions like “How can we be better neighbors to nonhuman species?”
Ultimately, she wants viewers to recognize that “biodiversity is essential, and it’s not a nice-to-have.”
Hillard at Lands End Lookout in San Francisco. Photo credit Alan Dunkin, provided by Hillard.
In a world shaped by our destructive actions, art emerges as a voice, warning us of the consequences that lie ahead.
We live in a constantly evolving world. Looking at the geologic time scale, we can see the Earth’s changes that have marked new eras all the way from the Archean epoch, 2.5 billion years ago, to today, the Holocene epoch. But how do we know when we are transitioning into a new epoch? And what kinds of changes in our world would lead to this geologic time-scale transition? The exhibition Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University offers us answers to these questions with its four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow.’
Ray Troll’s geological time scale
As we begin the exhibition tour, our well-spoken gallery guide, Ruth Caccavale, asks if any of us has ever heard the word “Anthropocene” before. After a short silence, she tells us the literal translation for Anthropocene is “the human epoch,” an appropriate word to describe the geological era we are in right now. Ruth continues to explain that, though not agreed upon when the Anthropocene epoch began (the main arguments being since the Industrial Revolution and since nuclear warfare), people believe the Earth is in a new era, one established by the fact that human impact is the greatest factor in determining the way the world is.
When the Anthropocene epoch was brought to the attention of the geological society, and after more than a decade of debate, they eventually declared that we were not in a new age, keeping us in the Holocene epoch. However, many still accept the term “Anthropocene” and explore what it means to be living in it. Among those exploring the implications of the Anthropocene epoch are the forty-five artists from around the world featured in Second Nature, who, through their photography-based art, expose the complex relationship of beauty and horror in our evolving world and show us how our world is truly controlled by our human impact.
Walking into the exhibit, I first notice the dismal yet meditative music playing quietly overhead. Ruth guides us through the galleries and stops us a considerable distance away from a black-and-white print. “What do you see when you look at this photograph?” she asks. “I see a mountain,” says someone in the crowd. “It looks overwhelming,” I add, noticing the heaviness of the mountain juxtaposed with the brittle buildings in front of it.
Travelers among Mountains and Streams from afar
Ruth then asks us to come closer to the photograph, and we all quickly notice that the mountain is not a mountain but instead a structure composed of skyscrapers and architecture.
Travelers among Mountains and Streams up close
Based on Fan Kuan’s famous painting from the Song Dynasty, Yang Yongliang, an alumnus of the China Academy of Art, created Travelers Among Mountains and Streams as a warning of what our world could look like if our need to urbanize and develop continued without governing. Yongliang is known for his dystopian recreations of traditional Chinese art, leaving his audience feeling both eerie and in awe. For me, the symbolism of having to step closer to the art to see the true meaning spoke to how it’s easier for people in power to overlook the environmental dangers of development, whereas once we stepped closer and could see each building in detail, we were put in the shoes of those living in urban areas who suffer the most from pollution and overcrowding.
We then made our way through the second section, “Toxic Sublime,” a collection of pieces that show how sometimes the most hazardous areas in the world can be the most beautiful. On the wall is a photo of the remains of a Russian church, buildings next to a nuclear testing site, and a crater from nuclear bomb testing made green to show residual radioactivity.
Danila Tkachenko’s Radioactive City, Contaminated Church, and Crater Formed after Nuclear Bomb Test
Next to it, is the photo of colorful ponds near a lithium mine in Chile. While the composition and colors scream “toxic,” I can’t help but admire the lure of it as well–an invitation to debate the ethics of turning tragedy into something tasteful.
Edward Burtynsky’s Lithium Mines #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile
Upon entering the third section, “Inhumane Geographies” (the theme I personally found most captivating), we are greeted by a somewhat overstimulating gallery of an orange and red island scene, with a singular purple and blue photo plastered in front of them. Sanne De Wilde’s Island of the Colorblind, told the story of a Micronesian community, who in the 18th century were devastated by a typhoon, leaving only 20 people alive. Among those left was the King, who began repopulating the Pingelap community. The King, however, carried the gene for color blindness, causing more than 10% of the Pingelap population today to be colorblind. Island of the Colorblind not only shows me how our environment and climate can truly change who we are, but it also gives voice to the Pingelap’s unique perspective on how color for them means something truly different–thus why Wilde chose to edit the photo in a way where chlorophyll (what makes trees green) creates a pink color in the photo.
Island of the Colorblind
As Ruth brings us to the final section, “Envisioning Tomorrow,” I am immediately drawn in by Aïda Muluneh’s collection of four photographs depicting women dressed in lavish blue and red clothing against the arid landscape behind them. As part of Afrofuturism, a form of science fiction art that explores the history and future of Africa and its people, Muluneh’s pieces challenge the stereotypes surrounding women gathering water in Africa. The pieces bring attention to the implications of women’s role in getting water, as it requires an immense amount of time and makes them vulnerable to sexual violence. Ruth also informs us that the artist grew up in Ethiopia and uses her art to emphasize the issue of water scarcity there. As my peers and I look at Muluneh’s colorfully piercing and empowering art, we can’t help but be speechless.
Aïda Muluneh’s collection
Regardless of whether or not the geological society accepts the Anthropocene as an epoch, we as humans need to open our eyes and understand that our actions have consequences, even if they may not affect us personally. We are changing the world… a lot. But if we can break it apart, we can also build it back up. Leaving the exhibit, I feel heartbroken for the ways we have torn apart our world, unsettled in the ways our destruction can still be beautiful, curious in how my environment has shaped me, and yet hopeful that we as humans can come together, acknowledge the wrong we have done, and begin to undo the damage. For those who may not understand how dire our situation is, studying the work of the 45 artists featured in Second Nature might be a good start.
