Category: Students Page 10 of 42

In Climate/Global Change, Environment/Sustainability, Field Research, History, Policy, Responsible Conduct, Science Communication & Education, Students

As conversations about the energy transition away from fossil fuels become increasingly important (and time-sensitive), some experts in environmental policy aren’t just worried about the conversations themselves. They’re worried about who has a seat at the table — and who doesn’t.

On November 8, at “Building a Just Foundation for Our Energy Transition,” a few of these experts — Sherri White-Williamson, Environmental Justice Policy Director at the NC Conservation Network; Josh McClenney, the North Carolina Field Coordinator at Appalachian Voices; and J. Spenser Darden, the Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy — spoke about this and other issues. Thomas Klug, a Research Associate at the Duke Energy Access Project, moderated the panel, which was put together by the Sanford Energy & Environment Club.

Klug asked the panelists to define what a “just transition” really means in the context of the panelists’ work, and whether it differs from a diverse and inclusive transition.

McClenney answered that a just transition entails recognizing that Black, brown, and indigenous communities, as well as low socio-economic status individuals, have historically faced the worst effects of fossil fuel economies. Living in the “physical and economic traction zones,” they’re the ones that lose jobs — like coal miners, in the case of McClenney’s work with Appalachian Voices.

However, where a diverse and inclusive transition involves “getting people to the table,” just policies will actually reflect the conversations had at the table. An unjust transition, McClenney said, is one where “people clap themselves on the back for doing such a great job having these diverse, inclusive discussions — then make policies that work against their participants.” Ensuring inclusion for communities that have historically been excluded is important, but it’s equally important to make sure the resulting policies are actually inclusive.

White-Williams agreed with McClenney — inclusion should never end at “checking the box.” The goal should be to incorporate the input of marginalized voices into resulting policy. White-Williams also added that fairness, while not necessarily guaranteed by diversity and inclusivity, is a key part of a just energy transition.

Spenser stressed the need to move away from “extractive, colonial” ways of thinking about energy and who makes up society, and to instead incorporate indigenous ways of thinking. He stated that diversity and inclusion is reactive: people realize flaws in the way they’ve built something and try to address it later by incorporating new elements. A just system, on the other hand, is built to be “for and by” communities that have been excluded from the very start.

Klug asked the panelists to recount some of the ways they’ve seen organizations, utilities, and decision makers putting the processes required for a just transition into practice.

McClenney spoke of revelations from the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020. Preventing utility shutoffs became critically important: people were losing jobs or forced to stay at home. They couldn’t come up with the money to pay their utility bills. While fighting utility shutoffs with Appalachian Voices, he saw a group of Knoxville organizations, including Knoxville Water and Energy for All, bringing attention to the fact that the shutoffs were not just a COVID problem. For some Black and brown communities, McClenney said, “keeping the lights on had always been an issue.” These grassroot groups’ advocacy expanded beyond the pandemic: they wanted energy and water recognized as human rights.

Klug asked the panelists how they feel about President Joe Biden’s performance with regard to just transitions in the energy sector — specifically, his January executive orders and recent bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.

White-Williams cited a major concern with Biden’s policies: they don’t give enough attention to rural issues. In Sampson county here in North Carolina, massive hog farms overwhelmingly surround communities of color. North Carolina’s new Farm Act will allow Smithfield Foods to build a system to trap methane from hog waste to be processed and eventually used as renewable electricity. But residents living near hog farms already experience toxic water, unbearable stench, and heightened risk of other diseases, and this system would likely make the problem even worse. It’s a textbook example of an unjust energy transition. That’s why environmental and civil rights organizations have asked the EPA to intervene — to no avail, at least thus far. (White-Williams is featured in this article about the current state of affairs.) “Rural America is suffering,” White-Williams said. She wants to see federal agencies using their power to ensure a just energy transition.

McClenney echoed White-Williams’ concern about hog farms, adding that deaths have resulted from providing workers with limited information about the conditions they would be working in — especially those who don’t speak English and whose undocumented status puts them in a vulnerable position.

On a different note, he thinks Biden’s expansions to Broadband and clean water are a step in the right direction. He stated that with North Carolina’s House Bill 951, which requires the Utilities Commission to cut emissions by 70% by 2030 (even more ambitious than Biden’s executive order, which seeks to cut US emissions in half by 2030), “there are opportunities right now to effect positive change — we just have to do a good job.” It’s about how we get to that carbon reduction goal.

Klug asked how people at universities — faculty, students, and staff alike — can contribute to this work in policy and in advocacy.

White-Williams told the audience to recognize that “having a degree does not make you an expert when you walk into these communities.” Community members have lived experience: they can tell policymakers and activists what they need, not the other way around. Change should be a partnership, and so should research: “Academics have a research question before they’ve even spoken to anyone.” Instead, “listen and learn from the people who have been there all their lives.”

Spenser invited the audience to think about “who the real experts are” in unique and different ways. Institutions like Duke are often separate from the communities they inhabit, serving as a sort of beacon on the hill. “We need to invert this paradigm,” he said.

McClenney added to Spenser’s criticism of schools like Duke, who “throw food out every day and hold dorm rooms empty during the summer while people go hungry and unhoused.” What’s needed is a fundamental reimagination of the university’s relationship to the community it inhabits. He also added to White-Williams’ point about research: it can be merely “another type of extraction” if not carried out in a just manner.

Klug asked the panelists whether we need to assess the impacts of energy policy differently through the lens of research.

McClenney flagged the words “affordability” and “reliability” in energy research, asking the audience to consider who that applies to. Affordability is not just about how rates compare to New York City or California, but whether someone has to forego insulin or go hungry in order to make a payment. By thinking through these words and what they really mean, we can “begin to understand impacts on a deeper level.”

Spenser implored researchers to use an intersectional lens: instead of considering economic impact and efficiency in isolation, to consider the way in which policies “contribute or ameliorate historic disparities.” In order to truly measure impact, efficacy, and outcome, researchers must be “historically aware and community invested.”

White-Williams agreed with McClenney and Spenser, asking researchers to consider whether policies are a “band-aid or a true fix.” She cited North Carolina’s Weatherization Assistance Program, which allocates tens of millions of dollars toward fixing “patched-up” homes that may have serious underlying problems. She wonders whether it may be better to simply spend the money on programs to place people in housing that is “actually livable.”

Klug opened the panel to questions. One audience member asked the panelists what concrete steps they recommend in order to “harness the power of diversity.”

White-Williams reiterated the importance of working with impacted communities, stressing the need for local leaders who can serve as experts on the needs of the community. Elected officials might “sacrifice the needs of these communities for some other interest,” but local advocates can apply pressure where needed.

Spenser pushed back on the question, stating that instead of urgency and speed, “we need to commit to a longer process” — honoring historical legacies and “spending time helping people understand what the conversation is.”

“Environmental policy isn’t sexy,” Spenser concluded. (“Except,” he added, “for pipelines.”)

Maybe not. But it’s important that it gets made — and that it gets made justly.

“News for the Rich, White, and Blue”: Nikki Usher on her new book and the state of American journalism

By Zella Hanson

On November 23, 2021

In Business/Economics, History, Policy, Responsible Conduct, Statistics, Students

News organizations are facing an economic crisis.

In their battle for survival, they are “realigning their priorities in ways that favor audiences who are willing to pay.” And those who are willing to pay tend to be rich, white, and politically blue.

On November 3, as part of the DeWitt Wallace Center’s Fall 2021 Information Inequalities Speaker Series, author and University of Illinois associate professor Nikki Usher discussed her new book News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism.

Usher began by explaining that as newspapers face “market failure,” only non-geographical news is in a position to survive. As news becomes a private good (The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times come to mind), the result is inconsistent and unequal access to news.

According to Usher, 1800 local communities lack any regular access to local news. Usher stated that political consequences result when news organizations pull back from places that don’t exhibit that aforementioned willingness to pay.

She gave an example of one such consequence: many journalists had their “heads in the sand” about the rising tides of populism in rural America. As a result, they were blindsided when Trump won the election. But the win simply revealed what had been the case all along.

The New York Times editor Dean Baquet acknowledged this after the election: “We’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country… and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world.”

Usher said that another consequence of the delocalization of news is reduced trust: only 11% of Republicans say they trust the media a great deal or a fair amount. Additionally, when places lose news, they grow more polarized, with reductions in split-ticket voting.

Usher said that she practices a kind of “gestalt scholarship,” employing the tools of ethnography and lived experience as well as quantitative data. She dipped into this side of her research, recounting a few anecdotes which represent the “materiality” of the loss of local news.

In 2018, the LA Times moved from its Downtown home, near Skid Row, to El Segundo. The move was not without controversy. In a 2018 editorial, an anonymous author wrote that “location matters, on both a physical and symbolic level, and… moving the headquarters far away from the local power base and the most important entities and stories the Times covers… is the wrong choice.”

The Miami Herald’s old home got demolished in 2015. Now the newsroom is near the airport, across from a cow pasture. “It’s bad for the psyche for there to be no building to exist for people to see every day,” said an editor. (A recent bit of unnerving news regarding the future of the Herald and journalism at large.)

Usher then stated that newsrooms are “places of power” that are becoming “increasingly inhospitable places for those who are non-white and who lack financial resources.”

In June 2020, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s top editor resigned after the publication of an article with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too,” led to a walkout by dozens of staff members. At the LA Times, Latinx journalists penned an open letter drawing attention to the fact that its 13% Latinx newsroom does not reflect its nearly 50% Latinx community. In Detroit, the disparity is even worse: an 80% Black population is served by a newsroom that is only 14% Black.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission put down a series of recommendations to improve diversity, noting that the journalistic profession was “shockingly backward” in its absence of Black journalists. The American Society of News Editors set a target date for newsrooms to be at parity with the populations they represented: 2000. They’ve since pushed the deadline to 2025.

It’s not looking good. That’s because, according to Usher, newsrooms aren’t hiring, and “when newsrooms don’t hire, they don’t hire minority journalists.”

Usher also touched on the “death of the working class reporter.” Increasingly, the only young people who are not deterred by journalism’s instability and lack of lucrativity are those who come from copious amounts of privilege. Add this to the inability of poorer students to pursue resume-building journalism activities alongside work-study jobs, and the preference of news outlets for the oft-wealthy students of elite universities, and one can see why “journalism is becoming a profession for the elite.”

Usher said that when “newsrooms become bastions of privilege, [that’s] bad news.” Losing journalists who come from blue-collar backgrounds means losing the ability to “empathize” with a whole set of experiences.

Usher said that as news revenue goes increasingly digital, reliance on those willing to pay is even more pronounced, with “consequences for equity in access and geographically specific news coverage.” She referenced The New York Times, whose rise “mirrors the rise in inequality” of access to news. “They know they’re leaving people behind,” Usher said. She quoted Dean Baquet, who acknowledged that 98% of Americans “were now excluded from The New York Times’ journalism and might well have to do with substandard information.”

Usher also discussed “Goldilock newspapers” — not too big, not too small, but just right for survival according to the “upside-down logic” of digital advertising. The problem is that, as Mike Wilson of the Dallas Morning News put it, “the pursuit of digital subscriptions has honed our focus on what we’re covering” — sometimes to the detriment of local readers. As a result of this phenomenon, Usher has seen reduced coverage in places considered too low-income to get advertisers. In one instance, she saw a dismissal of concerns about ad- and malware clunking up the computers of those with inferior Internet access because “those people are less likely to subscribe anyway.”

Where does this leave us? Usher identified a few potential solutions. She reiterated calls for more inclusive newsrooms, and added her own call for higher-ed financial aid reform so that lower-income students can have a fighting chance at pursuing journalism. She discussed the need for a “post newspaper consciousness” — to acknowledge that we cannot save the newspaper, but we can identify what journalism does best and save those “special parts.”

She left the audience with a final recommendation: journalism should “embrace the partisan media system.” Usher clarified her position: the news media like The New York Times “hides behind a veil of neutrality,” when this is only an (unconvincing) illusion. “People want to see them advocate for social justice,” she said, and she agrees. Usher doesn’t think polarization is inherently bad “if it’s polarization toward social justice and breaking down systemic inequality.”

“There’s no use assuaging people who have given up and aren’t listening. And then you have lots of people unsubscribing because the phony neutrality was irritating them,” Usher said. For organizations like the Times, the veil of neutrality is looking like a lose-lose.

She advised them to “go for those who are still listening. And just own it.”

Undergraduate Researchers William He and Annie Wang Dig Deeper into Hypergraphs

By Meghna Datta

On November 22, 2021

In Mathematics, Students

Like most things during the height of the pandemic, research that could be conducted virtually was conducted virtually. And that’s why, although juniors William He and Annie Wang have been working together on a research project since last September, they’ve never actually met in person.

He, a Math major from Houston, and Wang, a Computer Science and Math double-major from Raleigh, both work in the lab of Professor Debmalya Panigrahi, where the focus is on research in theoretical computer science, particularly graph algorithms. Wang and He did work on hypergraphs, and, after I asked them to explain what hypergraphs were in the most elementary terms (I am not a Math major), they went back and forth on how exactly to relay hypergraphs to a lay audience.

Here is what they landed on: hypergraphs are essentially generalizations of normal graphs. In a normal graph, there are edges –each edge connects two points. There are also vertices – each point is a vertex. But in a hypergraph, each edge connects multiple points.

He and Wang were looking at a generalization of graph reliability – if all edges disconnect at a certain probability, what is the probability that the graph itself will break down because crucial edges are disconnecting?

Their research adds to existing research on maximum flow problems, which Wikipedia tells us “entail finding a feasible flow through a flow network to obtain the maximum possible flow rate.” In a landmark paper written by T.E. Harris and F.S. Ross in 1955, the two researchers formulated the maximum flow problem using an example of the Soviet railroad and considering what cuts in the railroad would disconnect the nation entirely – and what cuts could be made with little impact to railway traffic flow.

Maximum flow problems are a core tenet of optimization theory, used widely in disciplines from math to computer science to engineering. You may not know what mathematical optimization is, but you’ve seen it in action before: in electronic circuitry, in economics, or unsurprisingly, used by civil engineers in traffic management.

It’s expected to be incredibly difficult to exactly calculate the target value of He and Wang’s question. They landed on an approximation that they know is far from the exact calculation, but still brings them closer to understanding hypergraph connectivity more fully.

So what draws them to research? For He, it’s like an itch. He describes that “sometimes I’ll be watching a movie, and then thirty minutes in I’m thinking about a possible solution to a math problem and then I can’t focus on the movie anymore.” You can’t get on with things until you scratch the itch, but the best part to him is when things finally start to make sense. For Wang, research is just plain fun. She enjoys learning about algorithms and theorems, and she loves the opportunity to work with professors who are at the forefront of their field.

After Duke, He wants to pursue a PhD, likely in theoretical computer science, while Wang is still weighing her options – whether she wants to go into academia or industry. While He came into Duke as a prospective Economics major, in quarantine especially he realized just how much he enjoyed math for the sake of itself.

Wang, similarly, thought she would want to pursue software engineering, but she’s slowly realizing that she likes “solving the problems within the field – problems that I need a PhD to solve.” The magic of research, for her, is that “you’re solving problems that no one has answers to yet.” And wherever the future takes both of them, she says that in doing research, even at the undergraduate level, “you feel like you’re pushing the boundary a tiny bit, and that’s a cool feeling.”

Post by Meghna Datta, Class of 2023

When the gut’s internal ecosystem goes awry, could an ancient if gross-sounding treatment make it right?

By Robin Smith

On November 17, 2021

In Animals, Lemurs, Medicine, Students

*Lemur researchers make a case for fecal transplants to reduce the side effects of antibiotics. Photo by David Haring, Duke Lemur Center.*

Dr. Cathy Williams knew something wasn’t right. The veterinarian had felt off for weeks after her 2014 trip to Madagascar.

At first she just felt bloated and uncomfortable and wasn’t interested in eating much. But eventually she developed a fever and chills that sent her to the emergency room.

When tested, doctors found that what she had wasn’t just a stomach bug. She was suffering from an infection of Clostridium difficile, a germ that causes severe diarrhea and abdominal pain and can quickly become life-threatening if not treated promptly.

“It was horrible,” Williams said.

The condition is often triggered when antibiotics disrupt the normal balance of bacteria that inhabit the gut, allowing “bad” bacteria such as C. difficile to multiply unchecked and wreak havoc on the intestines.

To get her infection under control, Williams asked her doctors if they could try an approach she and other veterinarians had used for decades to treat lemurs with digestive problems at the Duke Lemur Center. The procedure, known as a fecal microbiota transplant, involves taking stool from a healthy donor and administering it to the patient to add back “good” microbes and reset the gut.

At the time it was considered too experimental for clinical use in human cases like Williams’. She was prescribed the standard treatment and was sent home from the hospital, though she wouldn’t feel well enough to go back to work for another month. But now new research in lemurs is confirming what Williams and others long suspected: that this ancient if gross-sounding treatment can help an off-kilter gut microbiome get back to normal.

In a recent study in the journal Animal Microbiome, a research team led by Duke professor Christine Drea, former PhD student Sally Bornbusch and colleagues looked at the gut microbiomes of 11 healthy ring-tailed lemurs over a four-month period after receiving a seven-day course of the broad-spectrum antibiotic amoxicillin.

The lemurs were split into two experimental groups. One was a wait-and-see group, with continued follow-up but no further treatment after the antibiotics. The other group was given a slurry of their own feces, collected prior to antibiotic treatment and then mixed with saline and fed back to the same animal after their course of antibiotics was over.

“It sounds crazy,” Williams said. But she has used a similar procedure since the 1990s to treat illnesses in Coquerel’s sifaka lemurs, whose infants are known to eat their mother’s poop during weaning — presumably to get the microbes they’ll need to transition to solid food.

*A baby Coquerel’s sifaka tries some of her first solid foods. Photo by David Haring.*

Drea, Bornbusch and team used genetic sequencing techniques to track changes in the lemurs’ gut microbiome before, during and after treatment.

As expected, even a single course of antibiotics caused the numbers of microbes in their guts to plunge compared with controls, briefly wiping out species diversity in both experimental groups before returning to baseline.

“Antibiotics had dramatic effects, even in healthy animals,” Drea said.

But in terms of which types of bacteria bounced back and when, the patterns of recovery in the two groups were different. Lemurs that received the “poop soup” treatment started to stabilize and return to their pre-antibiotic microbiome within about two weeks. In contrast, the bacterial composition in the wait-and-see group continued to fluctuate, and still hadn’t quite returned to normal even after four months of observation.

This kind of therapy isn’t new. Reports of using fecal transplants to treat people suffering from food poisoning or diarrhea date back as far as fourth century China. The evidence for its effectiveness in captive settings has Bornbusch advocating for freezing stool at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, where she is now a postdoctoral fellow.

“If we can bank feces from animals when they’re healthy, that can be a huge benefit down the road,” Bornbusch said. “It can help the animals get better, faster.”

And now if any of her lemur patients were to get sick with C. difficile like she did, Williams said, “I would absolutely go with a fecal microbiota transplant.”

“People are put off by it,” Drea said, “But the disgust for this approach might actually have been holding up a fairly cheap and useful cure.”

*Ring-tailed lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center in North Carolina.* *Photo by David Haring, Duke Lemur Center*

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1749465), the Duke Lemur Center Director’s Fund, and the Duke Microbiome Center.

CITATION: “Antibiotics and Fecal Transfaunation Differentially Affect Microbiota Recovery, Associations, and Antibiotic Resistance in Lemur Guts,” Sally L. Bornbusch, Rachel L. Harris, Nicholas M. Grebe, Kimberly Roche, Kristin Dimac-Stohl, Christine M. Drea. Animal Microbiome, Oct. 1, 2021. DOI: 10.1186/s42523-021-00126-z.

The Duke Blockchain Lab: Disrupting and Redefining Finance

By Anna Gotskind

On November 8, 2021

In Business/Economics, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Students

The first decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was created in 2009 by a developer named Satoshi Nakamoto which is assumed to be a pseudonym. Over the last decade, cryptocurrency has taken the world by storm, influencing the way people think about the intersection of society and economics. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, another popular token, operate on blockchains.

Manmit Singh, a senior studying electrical and computer engineering, was introduced to blockchain his freshman year at Duke after meeting Joey Santoro ‘19, a senior studying computer science at the time.

Singh quickly found that he was not only interested in the promise of blockchain but skilled at building blockchain applications as well. As a result, he joined the Duke blockchain lab, a club on campus that, at the time, had no more than fifteen students. Singh, who is now president of the Duke Blockchain Lab, explained that there are now over 100 members in the club working on different projects related to blockchain.

“Blockchain is a computer network with a built-in immutable ledge.”
Manmit SIngh

Essentially, computers process information, the internet allows us to communicate information and blockchain is the next step in the evolution of the digital era. It not only allows computers to communicate value but to transfer it as well in a completely transparent way because every transaction is tracked and, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger which is visible to others.

The concept and application of blockchain is not intuitive to everybody. Not only do people have difficulty understanding it, but they do not even know where to begin asking questions.

For Singh, a key element to the club’s success was recruiting new members. The crypto space experienced a crash in 2017 resulting in a lot of skepticism around an already novel idea, decentralized currency. As a result, it was crucial to educate others on the potential of decentralized finance (DeFi), cryptocurrency, and, of course, blockchain. When recruiting, Singh wanted to bring in both tech and business-focused students so that they could not only work on building blockchain applications but conduct research on business models and how to generate value within decentralized finance as well.

Members of the Duke Blockchain Lab at a
weekly meeting learning about Stablecoins,
one type of token in cryptocurrency

Currently, members are working on a variety of projects including looking at consensus algorithms or how the blockchain makes decisions given that it is decentralized so inherently no one is in control. However, their most ambitious venture is the development of their Crypto Fund where people can invest money.

They are also looking to develop a Duke-inspired marketplace with talented Duke artists to sell non-fungible-tokens or NFTs. If unfamiliar, Abby Shlesinger, a senior studying Art History, created a blog to educate people on what NFTs are.

One of the first projects Singh led involved developing a “smart contract” for cryptocurrency-based energy trading on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, a computation engine that acts like a decentralized computer that can hold millions of executable projects. Smart contracts are programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met.

Additionally, Singh and other members of the Duke Blockchain Lab are working on tokenomic research with Dr. Harvey, a Duke professor who recently published a book alongside Santoro titled “DeFi and the Future of Finance” which you can find here.

“Every blockchain is a complete economy that exists on a different plane.”

Within these blockchain economies are various different types of tokens that vary in function and value. Tokenomics explores how these economies work and can be used to generate value. When asked to compare tokenomic concepts to ones in traditional finance, Singh explained that payment tokens are like dollars, asset tokens are like bonds and security tokens are like stocks. Currently, several companies are working on creating competitive blockchains that will be both cheaper and faster allowing creating an avenue for blockchain to continue accelerating into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Santoro, who introduced Singh to blockchain, graduated from Duke in 2019 and went on to form The Fei Protocol, a stable coin that unlike bitcoin does not change in value. His protocol raised one billion dollars within several weeks and while it had some initial challenges, it is now set to launch V2, a second version, soon.

Singh plans to continue working on blockchain applications after graduating this spring and hopes to combine it with his passion for entrepreneurship.

“I am enthused by the applications of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the internet of things in disrupting the world as we know it.”
Manmit Singh

School Segregation & Culture War: Color of Education 2021

By Zella Hanson

On November 4, 2021

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, History, Lecture, Policy, Responsible Conduct, Science Communication & Education, Students

Perhaps you’ve heard of the 1619 Project. A Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalism project which sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,” the project has been controversial and is thought to have sparked the current debate over critical race theory in the classroom.

Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, spoke at the Color of Education virtual summit on October 26. She discussed her journalistic research on systemic racial inequities in the education system, as well as the 1619 Project and the struggle over teaching race in the classroom.

Hannah-Jones defined the public school as an “intimate place” where young members of society come together to “exchange ideas and culture, meeting across class and race.” The public school serves to create community, which, she stressed, is necessary for a healthy democracy. “A sense of community prevents polarization,” she said. “I know that a person who’s different from me still wants, fundamentally, the same things.” That gives us more of an opportunity to solve political problems without hostility.

Instead, she often sees “segregated” low-income mostly-Black schools and “integrated” mostly-white schools, separated by a disturbing chasm of resources and opportunity. (She’s written about this in several Times pieces.) She remarked that “this bifurcation doesn’t serve our democracy and it doesn’t serve humanity.”

But that’s been a problem since before Brown v. Board of Education. What’s changed in the last few years, according to Hannah-Jones, is that in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, there is now a “culture war” being waged over critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic framework that examines the intersection of race with law and public policy. The theory is controversial: many fear the fundamental critique of the US legal and economic system that the theory ultimately implies. (In 2020, whereas white conservatives and more moderate liberals tended to blame fatal incidents of police brutality on “a few bad apples,” the viewpoint consistent with critical race theory is that “the problem is the barrel and the systems that produce it.”)

Laws banning the teaching of critical race theory have alread y been passed or are in the works in several states, including here in North Carolina, where Governor Roy Cooper recently vetoed a bill which sought to regulate the teaching of several race-related concepts, including whether “a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist.”

There’s also historical revisionism, known pejoratively as ‘revisionist history’: the reinterpretation of orthodox views surrounding historical events, or, according to fellow Times contributor and historian Timothy Snyder, “the parts of history that challenge leaders’ sense of righteousness or make their supporters uncomfortable.” (Snyder says that in the US, “the ‘revisionists’ are people who write about race.”)

Critical race theory ultimately requires some revisionism — to critically examine the intersection of race with the laws and policy of the current moment, we must critically examine how we got here, and that means taking another look at the US’ legal history, war history, even its history of infrastructure. Critical race theory is usually taught in college humanities classes. (Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in the 1980s, and her work is decidedly college level — I’ve read her here at Duke, but certainly not before.) But because critical race theory and revisionism are linked, it’s come to pass that any K-12 effort to teach about how racism has informed US history now gets labeled as “critical race theory” by adversaries of these efforts.

Critical race theory has become a buzzword — and in many circles, it’s a bad word. These days, if a parent thinks you’re teaching critical race theory, you might soon find yourself without a job. (The summit required a passcode and was not recorded for fear that educators participating might be “outed as believers” in critical race theory and subsequently maligned.)

Along with educators in the Zoom comments, Hannah-Jones discussed this problem: teachers are getting accused of teaching “critical race theory”; the term is being used as a weapon and to imply wrongdoing; and it seems that parents, legislators, and even some educators don’t know what it actually means.

Hannah-Jones asserted that this is “how propaganda works.” The term “critical race theory” is being used to produce fear and automatic condemnation, which distracts from the content of the theory and shuts down further (more rational) conversation. Hannah-Jones gave some advice to educators: “When a parent says, ‘I do not want my child to learn critical race theory,’ Ask them what they think that it is. They don’t know. And then you get to say, ‘Well, no, that’s history. Well, no, that’s anti-slavery.’ You get the point.”

Hannah-Jones explained that “as educators, you have to have these conversations with people.” Parents don’t necessarily know what their children are learning in school — and that can be a source of anxiety. So when “bad-faith actors are fear mongering, saying ‘Don’t you know what terrible things your kids are learning?’” it’s all too easy for parents to become distraught and distrust their child’s teacher.

Moving to discussing other issues in education, Hannah-Jones emphasized that schools are generationally deprived of resources, which is a problem that “can’t be fixed overnight.” She’s seen parents trying to advocate for their children and failing because they lack proximity to social, political, or legal power. “Maybe they can’t come to PTA because they’re a single mother, or they work at Popeyes — they get dismissed,” she said. “There’s no meeting with the superintendent. They can’t call the media in.” And when power dictates one’s ability to make change, the generational deprivation of resources can only continue.

Jayden Grant, a senior at Falls Lake Academy, asked Hannah-Jones how to ensure that these issues are addressed on the level of charter and private schools, which aren’t governed by the same policies.

Hannah-Jones replied that she is fundamentally opposed to charter and private schools, viewing them as “undemocratic by design.” As such, “holding them accountable” is only possible through public advocacy, namely through the media. Students have the strongest voice, she told Jayden. They’re the reason these schools exist in the first place; it’s up to them to challenge policies or actions they see as unfair and make the public aware.

On that note, Hannah-Jones brought the conversation back to the question of which version of our collective past will be taught in the K-12 classroom. Hannah-Jones said that based on the feedback she’s gotten and conversations she’s had, the 1619 project has inspired kids. It’s made them excited about history and learning in general. She denounced the neoliberal “privatization and commodification of education,” stating that often, parents wrongly view themselves as consumers. “We need to center kids in these discussions,” she said.

Hannah-Jones wrapped up the discussion with a call to action. She told the audience to “get angry” that authors like Ruby Bridges and Toni Morrison are being blacklisted, because “that is the same kind of thinking that’s led to the inequality we see now.” She claimed that “people wouldn’t be freaking out about the 1619 Project if it wasn’t having an effect,” but the Project is making waves, because “those who control the stories about who we are control the culture.” And the culture Hannah-Jones wants to see is one which sees the “least of us as just as deserving as anyone else.”

Professor Emeritus at UNC Harry Amana had the last word, saying that one cannot be an educator without being an optimist. That’s because, as an educator, you believe that “if people knew better, they would do better.”

Maybe one day, we all will.

Back in Action: HackDuke’s 2021 “Code for Good”

By Zella Hanson

On November 3, 2021

In Artificial Intelligence, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Science Communication & Education, Students

If you walked across Duke’s Engineering Quad between 9AM on Saturday, October 23rd, and 5PM on Sunday, October 24th, the scene might’ve looked like that of any other day: students gathered in small groups, working diligently.

But then you’d see the giant banner and realize something special was afoot. These students were participating in HackDuke’s “Code for Good,” one of the most eminent social good hackathons in the country.

Participants have to “build something, not just an idea,” said Anita Li, co-director of HackDuke. Working in teams, students develop software, hardware, or quantum solutions to problems in one of four tracks: inequality, health, education, and energy and environment.

Participants can win “track prizes,” where $2,400 in total donations are made in winners’ names ($300 for first, $200 for second, $100 for third) to charities doing work in that track. There are other prizes too. Sponsors, including Capital One, Accenture, and Microsoft give incentives: if participants incorporate their technology or use their database, they’re qualified to win that sponsor’s prize (gift cards, usually, or software worth hundreds of dollars).

This year, Duke’s department of Student Affairs sponsored the health track, in hopes that participants might come up with ideas that could help promote student wellness here at Duke. “It’s a great space for thinking about these issues,” Li said.

Li told me they had more than 1,000 registrations, though there’s always a little less turnout. HackDuke is open to all students and recent graduates, so that “you get to see these cool ideas from everywhere.”

Just under half of this year’s participants were from Duke, almost 10% hailed from UNC, and the rest were from other universities across the US and the world. 30 percent of participants were women — a significant increase from the last HackDuke covered by the Research Blog, in 2014.

This year is “particularly interesting,” Li said, because of the hybrid model. Last year, everything was virtual. This year, about 300 (vaccinated) students attended in person, making HackDuke one of the few Major League Hacking events with an in-person component this year. With the hybrid model, talks, workshops, and demos are all livestreamed so that no one misses out.

Some social events also had online elements: you could zoom into the Bob Ross painting session as well as the open mic, which Li said quickly turned into karaoke night. The spicy ramen challenge was “a little harder over Zoom.”

I came across Sydney Wang and Ray Lennon, along with teammate Jean Rabideau, as they were building a web app called JamJar for the Education Track contest. In the app, students give real-time feedback to teachers about how well they’re understanding the material. There are three categories: engagement (you can rank your engagement along a scale from “mentally I’m in outer space” to “locked in), understanding (“where am I?” to “crystal clear”), and speed (“a glacial pace” to “TOO FAST!”). Student responses get compiled and graphed to show mean markers of understanding over time.

Lennon said he’s participating because “this is the best way to learn: to be thrown in the fire and have to learn as you go.” Wang felt the same way. She’s new to coding, and feels like she’s learning a lot from Lennon.

Like Lennon and Wang, many participants see HackDuke as an opportunity to learn. There are technical workshops where participants can learn HTML and CSS. There are talks where speakers discuss working in the coding and social good sector. The CTO of change.org, Elaine Zhou, flew to Durham to speak to participants about her experience. So there’s a networking opportunity, too — participants can meet people like Zhou doing the work they want to do, and professors and company representatives who can help them on their journey to get there.

There were challenges. Staying hydrated was one: by Sunday morning, they’d gone through seven cases of water, 16 cases of soda, and three cases of red bull. “It takes a lot of liquids,” Li said. And then there’s sleep — or lack thereof. When Li was participating in her freshman year, she slept for about three hours. Many people pull all-nighters, but “nap sporadically everywhere,” Li said. “It’s like finals season, with everyone knocked out.” She saw a handful of guys sleeping on the floor in Fitzpatrick. She gave them bed pads.

Li’s love for HackDuke is contagious. She loves to see participants focusing on social good and drawing on their awareness of what’s happening in the world. “People are thinking about things that are intense; they’re really worrying about issues facing certain communities,” Li said.

At HackDuke, people really are coding for good.

Post by Zella Hanson

How Freshman Engineers Solve Real-World Problems in EGR 101

By Camila Cordero

On November 2, 2021

In Biomedical Engineering, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Lecture, Students

The sound of drills whirring, the smell of heated plastic from the 3D printers, and trying to see through foggy goggles. As distracting as it may sound, this is a normal day for a first-year engineering student (including myself) in class.

During these past few weeks, freshmen engineers have been brainstorming and building projects that have piqued their interest in their EGR101 class. Wanting to know more, I couldn’t help but approach Amanda Smith, Jaden Fisher, Myers Murphy, and Christopher Cosby, and ask about their goal to make an assistive device to help people with limited mobility take trash cans up an inclined driveway that is slippery and wet.

“Our client noticed the problem in his neighborhood in Chapel Hill with its mainly-elderly population, and asked for a solution to help them,” Fisher says. “We thought it would be cool to give back to the community.” Their solution: a spool with a motor.

Coming from a mechanical engineering mindset, the team came up with the idea to create a spool-like object that has ropes that connect to the trash can, and with a motor, it would twist, pull up the trash can, and then slowly unroll it back down the driveway. As of now, they are currently in the prototyping phase, but they are continuing to work hard nonetheless.

“For now, our goal is to slowly begin to scale up and hopefully be able to make it carry a full trash can. Maybe one day, our clients can implement it in real life and help the people that need it,” says Smith.

All of this planning and building is part of the Engineering Design & Communication class, also known as EGR 101, which all Pratt students have to take in their first year. Students are taught about the engineering design process, and then assigned a project to implement what they learned in a real life situation by the end of the semester.

“This is a very active learning type of class, with an emphasis on the design process,” says Chip Bobbert, one of the EGR 101 professors. “We think early exposure will be something that will carry forward with student’s careers.”

Not only do the students deal with local clients, but some take on problems from nationwide companies, like Vivek Tarapara, Will Denton, Del Cudjoe, Ken Kalin, Desmond Decker, and their client, SKANSKA, a global construction company.

“They have an issue scheduling deliveries of materials to their subcontractors, which causes many issues like getting things late, dropped in the wrong areas, etc.,” Tarapara explains. “There is a white board in these construction sites, but with people erasing things and illegible handwriting, we want to make a software-based organizational tool so that everyone involved in the construction is on the same page.”

Watching the team test their code and explain to me each part of their software, I see they have successfully developed an online form that can be accessed with a QR code at the construction site or through a website. It would input the information on a calendar so that users can see everything at any time, where anyone can access it, and a text bot to help facilitate the details.

“We are currently still working on making it look better and more fluid, and make a final solution that SKANSKA will be satisfied with,” Denton says, as he continues to type away at his code.

_{Vivek Tarapara (left) and Will Denton (right) working on their code and text bot}

One final project, brought up by Duke oral surgeon Katharine Ciarrocca, consists of students Abigail Paris, Fernando Rodriguez, Konur Nordberg, and Camila Cordero (hey, that’s me!), and their mouth prop design project.

After many trials and errors, my team has created a solution that we are currently in the works of printing with liquid silicone rubber. “We have made a bite block pair, connected by a horizontal prism with a gap to clip on, as well as elevated it to give space for the tongue to rest naturally,” Paris elaborates.

The motivation behind this project comes from COVID-19. With the increase of ICU patients, many receiving endotracheal intubations, doctors have come to realize that these intubations are causing other health issues such as pressure necrosis, biting on the tongue, and bruising from the lip. Dr. Ciarrocca decided to ask the EGR 101 class to come up with a device to help reduce such injuries.

_{Medium-fidelity prototype of mouth prop inside of mouth model with an endotracheal intubation tube}

Being part of this class and having first-hand look at all the upcoming projects, it’s surprising to see freshman students already working on such real-world problems.

“One of the things I love about engineering and this course is that we’re governed by physics and power, and it all comes to bear,” says Steven McClelland, another EGR 101 professor. “So this reckoning of using the real world and beginning to take theory and take everything into consideration, it’s fascinating to see the students finally step into reality.”

Not only does it push freshmen to test their creativity, but it also creates a sense of teamwork and bonding between classmates, even in the most unordinary class setting.

“I look around the room and there’s someone wearing a pool noodle, another boiling alcohol, and another trying to measure the inside of their mouth,” says Bobberts as he scans the area quickly. “I’m excited to see people going and doing stuff together.”

Post by Camila Codero, Class of 2025

Integrating Pediatric Care in NC: Behavioral Health Perspectives

By Vibhav Nandagiri

On October 29, 2021

In Faculty, Global Health, Medicine, Policy, Students

In healthcare, developing a new treatment is often half of the battle. The other half lies in delivering these treatments to those communities who need them the most. Coordinating care delivery is the goal of NC Integrated Care for Kids (InCK), an integrated pediatric service delivery and payment platform looking to serve 100,000 kids within five counties — Alamance, Orange, Durham, Granville, and Vance — in central North Carolina. The project is a collaborative effort between Duke, UNC, and the NC Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) funded by a federal grant from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The program’s executive director is Dr. Charlene Wong (MD, MSPH), a Duke researcher, physician, and professor who leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers and policy experts as they explore ways to reduce costs via integrating care for North Carolina youth enrolled in Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

The five counties that are part of NC InCK

I recently had the opportunity to speak with two of InCK’s service partners: Dr. Gary Maslow (MD, MPH) and Chris Lea (Duke ’18). Both work within the Behavioral Health group of InCK, which seeks to use behavioral health expertise through collaborative care and training providers to help support pediatric care. Maslow, a professor at the Duke Medical School, has focused heavily on child and developmental psychiatry throughout his career. Having entered medical school with a desire to work in pediatric hematology, Maslow recalls how a conversation with a mentor steered him in the direction of behavioral health. At the time, Maslow was part of the Rural Health Scholars program at Dartmouth College; while discussing his aspirations, one of his professors asked him to consider conditions outside of cancer, leading Maslow to consider chronic illness and eventually child psychiatry. “Kids have other problems,” Maslow’s professor told him.

When looking at healthcare networks, especially those in rural areas in North Carolina, Maslow noticed a disaggregated service and payment network where primary care providers were not getting the necessary education to support the behavioral health needs of children. His work with Lea, a third-year medical student at Duke, has centered around looking at Medicaid data to understand provider distribution, medication prescription, and access to therapy based one’s area of residence. Lea’s path to NC InCK began as an undergraduate at Duke, where he obtained a B.S. in psychology in 2018. As he explains, mental health has been a vested interest of his for years, a passion reinforced by coursework, research at the Durham VA Medical Center, and NC InCK. He discussed the important of appropriate crisis response, specifically how to prepare families and providers in the event of pediatric behavioral health crises such as aggression or suicidality, as critical in improving behavioral health integration. These safety plans are critical both before a potential crisis and after an actual crisis occurs.

Two main goals of Maslow and Lea’s work are to increase the implementation of safety plans for at-risk youth and expand follow-up frequency in primary care settings. The focus on primary care physicians is especially critical considering the severe shortage of mental health professionals around North Carolina.

The behavioral health group is but one subset of the larger NC InCK framework. The team is led by Chelsea Swanson (MPH). Other collaborators include Dr. Richard Chung (MD), Dan Kimberg, and Ashley Saunders. NC InCK is currently in a two-year planning period, with the program’s launch date slated for 2022.

For Undergraduate Student Tiffany Yen, Sustainability is More Than Just a Buzzword

By Meghna Datta

On October 27, 2021

In Chemistry, Environment/Sustainability, Students

Tiffany Yen, a Duke junior majoring in chemistry, grew up in the sunny suburbs of Los Angeles, never too far from the coastline. She’s always loved being outside, especially in California where there is no shortage of trails to hike and beaches to go to. Friends know her as a Patagonia aficionado, going so far as to buy her a book profiling the company’s business model for her birthday. In fact, from Yen, I learned that every Patagonia store gives out city-specific stickers, so if you feel so inclined, you can collect them (as Yen obviously does). All this is to say: Tiffany Yen has always been interested in sustainability.

“I never understood why what we do has to come at the cost of the planet,” Yen said, in discussing how her years in school learning about climate change fueled her passion for sustainable science. “The environment is so important. Without it, we wouldn’t be here.”

Unsure of what she wanted to study at Duke and where she wanted to go post-graduation, she decided to take her two interests – sustainability and chemistry, particularly polymer chemistry – and see what she could do to combine them. She knew coming into college that she wanted to do research, so that landed her at the Becker Lab for Functional Materials.

The Becker Lab is a multidisciplinary organic materials lab focused on biomedical applications – specifically, things like adhesives and drug delivery. Yen works on improvements to intercranial pressure sensors. Traditionally, after head trauma, doctors need to measure the intercranial space to see if the brain is damaged. The sensor that is used is wired and tends to be a very invasive procedure – the probe is connected to a machine outside, and there’s a high risk of infection.

Collaborators at Northwestern developed a biodegradable wireless device that, after implantation, doesn’t require a secondary procedure to take out. The problem is that it degrades a little too fast – and so measurements can’t be taken. Yen, with her mentor, is working on building a film encapsulation to make it possible for the device to take good measurements.

Right now, they’re trying out azelaic acid instead of succinic acid. Azelaic acid has favorable anti-inflammatory properties and is commonly used in acne medications. It could also potentially increase the bioresorbability of the polymer. Their hope is that the film not only helps the body metabolize more of the polymer, but actually helps in healing.

So why medical research? Yen explains that while her work may not seem obviously linked to sustainability, the push for finding materials that can degrade is extremely relevant. And while she’s not all that interested in medicine specifically, she likes things that are practical and applicable.

“When I did research in the past,” Yen said, “there wasn’t always an application. It sometimes was about synthesizing something, just for the sake of science.” And while there’s certainly value in strengthening science fundamentals, she admits that research in that vein doesn’t really appeal to her. “I want to work on things that I directly see adding value to society.”

After college, Yen sees herself going to graduate school and working towards a PhD in “some physical science related to chemistry.” Ultimately, her goal is to work at the interface of venture capital and scientific research, using her science background to find and fund promising innovations in sustainability. “There are so many incredible things being researched out there,” Yen says, “but the biggest problem in research is funding and commercializing.” She continues, “I think there are other people out there who can do better research than I can, so I want to go out there, find the stuff, and fund it.”

Yen has come to believe that just because she dedicated her time at Duke to science, it doesn’t mean she needs to stay in science forever. There’s value in scientific knowledge no matter where you go. And as businesses realize that public interest in sustainability is growing, she’s crossing her fingers that her skillset will poise her to be a valuable asset in seeking out new innovations.

She said that when she came into college, she felt a pressure to pursue a more traditional path, like being pre-med. “I value stability, and I’m very risk-averse,” she laughs.

But when she asked herself what she’d be happiest doing, she knew it would be trying to save the planet in some way. But she clarifies: “At this point, I can’t save the planet. I think that’s a very far-fetched thing for one person to do.” Instead, “I’d rather try and maybe fail than not try at all.”

Post by Meghna Datta, Class of 2023