Category: Students Page 12 of 42

Cemetery, Community, Classroom: Collaborating to Honor the Dead

On September 21, 2021

In Art, Business/Economics, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Policy, Responsible Conduct, Students

The institutional neglect and indignity faced by many African Americans during and after the Jim Crow era in the South didn’t end when their lives did. In a panel hosted by the Duke Office of Durham & Community Affairs on Sept. 10, a community leader, Duke professor, and undergraduate student discussed some of the work they are doing to combat the marginalization of Durham’s deceased in Geer Cemetery, two miles from Duke’s campus.

Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia, President, Friends of Geer Cemetery

Founded on land purchased from Frederick and Polly Geer by John O’Daniel, Nelson Mitchell, and Willie Moore in 1877, Geer Cemetery is the final resting place for over 3000 of Durham’s African American citizens. As Maplewood Cemetery was segregated, from 1877 until the opening of Beechwood cemetery in 1924 Geer served as the only cemetery for the African American dead. Lacking public funding and under fire from the health department for overcrowding, Geer Cemetery closed in the 1930s and, in the absence of a plan for its continued upkeep, fell into a state of disrepair.

President of Friends of Geer Cemetery Debra Taylor Gonzalez-Garcia provided a brief history of Geer Cemetery.

The nonprofit Friends of Geer Cemetery was formed in 2003 by “concerned citizens and neighbors” and has worked to “restore the cemetery’s grounds and research its histories” under their mission statement “restore, reclaim, respect.” According to Gonzalez-Garcia, work consists of maintaining the cemetery grounds, repairing headstones, writing life stories, and advocating for recognition.

Friends of Geer Cemetery has accomplished a lot in terms of restoration: in 2004 the cemetery was unrecognizable, with broken headstones, overgrowth, and sunken burials. Today, with the help of Keep Durham Beautiful, Preservation Durham, and other volunteers, the entire cemetery can now be easily viewed.

The organization also continues to work tirelessly toward their other objectives, reclamation and respect. By mining local records, research volunteers have created a database which includes approximately 1,651 burials, but efforts are ongoing.

Gonzalez-Garcia expressed excitement about the organization receiving grant funding for an archaeological survey. “[The survey] will help us to map out burials, because currently, there is no map,” Gonzalez-Garcia said. “We aren’t sure where people are buried.”

The community leader discussed how efforts to reclaim Geer Cemetery bring about questions that reckon with white supremacy in general. “We’re not told stories of the African Americans who built Durham,” Gonzalez-Garcia said. “Why do we know so much about Washington Duke, and nothing of Augustus Shepard? Why should Maplewood still exist and not Geer Cemetery?”

Associate Professor of the Practice in International Comparative Studies Adam Rosenblatt expressed his interest in how care for the dead is “bound up with human rights and social justice.” This interest is personal: he has his own graveless ancestors who disappeared in the Holocaust. He expressed his passion for educating others about “places of mourning in our midst” through “community-engaged” scholarship.

Along with Gonzalez-Garcia, Rosenblatt sponsored a Story+ program at Duke entitled Geer Cemetery: Labor, Dignity, and Practices of Freedom in an African American Burial Ground. With the help of sponsors and a graduate mentor, Duke undergraduates Nyrobi Manuel, Kerry Rork, and Huiyin Zhou researched the cemetery closely in order to “uncover the stories of ordinary citizens and add these stories back into the historic narrative about Geer.” The researchers produced three unique, interactive digital projects which will contribute to the Friends of Geer Cemetery’s online platform for education and outreach.

Rosenblatt discussed one challenge the Story+ engaged with: What really constitutes a human subject? The IRB’s definition doesn’t include the dead; there’s no IRB protocols for researching the dead and their stories. Many archives disappear entirely, or are fragmented.

Nyrobi Manuel, a Duke undergraduate, was one of Rosenblatt and Golzalez-Garcia’s mentees. Manuel took Rosenblatt’s course “Death, Burial, and Justice in the Americas” and says the course inspired her to dig deeper into African American death practices. Through the Story+, Manuel researched John C. Scarborough, who established the fifth-oldest Black-owned funeral home in the country. She produced a project entitled “Scarborough and Hargett Funeral Home: Dignified Death and Compassion in the Black Community.”

Manuel discussed her findings. Many funeral directors became important figures in their community, and John C. Scarborough was no different. A philanthropist and important community member, he helped to establish Scarborough Nursery School, North Carolina’s oldest licensed nursery school.

What’s always drawn Gonzalez-Garcia to Geer Cemetery is its “quiet beauty” and sense of connection. Though her ancestors are buried in Virginia, where she’s from, Geer Cemetery seeks to tell stories of African Americans through “emancipation and reconstruction: throughout history.” Geer is special because it seeks to tell the story of her “blood relatives” while also celebrating the history of Durham, which, she said fondly, is “my community now.”

New Blogger Olivia Ares: Building Bridges

By Olivia Ares

On September 21, 2021

In Chemistry, Science Communication & Education, Students

My name is Olivia Ares (she/her), and I’d like to provide the opportunity for you to get to know me better. In true blog post fashion, here are some quick facts at the outset:

I’m from Johnson City, TN, which probably doesn’t mean anything to you unless you’re a fan of Mountain Dew or Logan from Gilmore Girls.
I’m a freshman here at Duke, and I plan on majoring in Evolutionary Anthropology. For now.
My party trick is knowing way too much about celebrities.
I’m half-Cuban, but I’m also a vegetarian, which is a tragedy in seven words. At least I’ll always have moros y christianos.
I play the fiddle; not the violin. What’s the difference, you ask?
Those close to me claim I have a “cardigan problem.” (By that, they mean that I own an obscene amount of cardigans. If you ask me, that sounds like the exact opposite of a problem.)

Pictured here is my green three-quarter sleeve cardigan with flower-shaped buttons, which provides a colorful accent.

You may be asking yourself what interest I could possibly have in being a research blogger, since I’m clearly destined for a future in comedy (or cardigan connoisseurship). And especially since, as you’ll soon learn, I’m not a science person.

Like a lot of people during our year of virtual school, I went through a lifetime of hobby phases in a matter of months. I started with baking, which only lasted until the bread flour ran out. I watched a lot of movies that I had always wanted to see (which often disappointed), and I rewatched a lot of movies I loved (which never disappointed). I tried learning the guitar, but I never practiced enough to build up the right callouses, so I never practiced at all. I discovered a love for puzzles and an utter lack of skill for them. I downloaded The Sims 4 on a free trial, spent months building a super cool house, then deleted the whole game.

My three favorite things in one picture: lavender cold brew, Taylor Swift, and my blue wool cardigan.

The only thing that’s stuck so far has been reading. In middle school, we used to stay up late with a flashlight under our covers to finish books, then abruptly lost all motivation somewhere between The Giver and The Scarlet Letter. I think we forgot along the way that there are no rules to reading; there’s no one to impress. There’s no one to sample your sourdough or judge your twangy, painful acoustic cover of “Three Blind Mice.” Reading is something you do purely for yourself.

Reading makes information and ideas universally accessible; it connects worlds using only ink on a page. There’s this myth that analytical minds are not creative minds and vice versa, and it alienates people: people who would bring such great perspectives to the table if they hadn’t been defined by a checklist of abilities. Reading is for everyone to find what they love and to love what they find (or hate it; one of the great things about doing things for yourself is that you can just quit whenever you want to).

Scientific research, on the other hand, is something produced for everyone. Humans exploring more and more about the world is something that affects all of us, despite the research being conducted only by a select few of us.

My black long-sleeve cardigan is a personal favorite, as it goes with pretty much everything.

Freshman year of high school, I finished chemistry with a B, which was a miracle considering I was rocking a D around November. I had to change my way of looking at the material; I couldn’t remember the makeup of an atom, but I could remember it if I thought about the stories of individuals who built off of each model in succession. I didn’t understand stoichiometry, but I did understand you have to balance equations just like weights on a scale or kids on a see-saw.

My point is: everyone sees things differently. Exclusivity in different fields is fabricated to make information and education elitist, and it is not reflective of individuals’ ability to understand the world. If you want to read about cool science stuff, you shouldn’t feel left out because you’re more of an art history person. If you want to read about cool art history stuff, you shouldn’t feel left out because you’re an aerospace engineer.

So I like to think that I can be that bridge for some people; at the very least, I can do it for myself.

Post by Olivia Ares, Class of 2025

Student Photographer Josephine Vonk Marvels at Life Through her Camera

By Meghna Datta

On September 20, 2021

In Science Communication & Education, Students, Visualization

For Josephine Vonk, the best part about photography is the people. “I couldn’t care less about the technical aspects,” she laughs. “That part is just a means to an end.”

Vonk, a junior from Houston and a Psychology major with a certificate in Documentary Studies and a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, had no interest in photography prior to Duke. As a first-year, she stumbled into a Documentary Studies class she was required to take as part of the FOCUS program and only later realized it was taught by Professor Susie Post Rust – a former photographer for National Geographic. Reminiscing on her first year at Duke, she recalled how “halfway through the semester, Susie sat me down and basically told me I was bombing the class – I needed to step it up.”

Josephine Vonk (T ’23)

Rather than forcing her into a loathsome relationship with the craft, however, the challenge piqued her interest and pushed her to learn her way around a camera – if only to prove to herself that she could. After her first semester, she decided she wanted to take another photography class -DOCST 230, or Small Town USA. A couple of years later, she’s now decidedly more comfortable around a camera. Now in her second year as a Service Learning Assistant (SLA) for Post Rust’s class, she also recently joined the team at the 9^th Street Journal as a photographer and continues to take photography classes.

For Vonk, the magic of photography is the excuse it gives her to marvel at the way humans behave. It allows her to step outside the confines of what normal people do to gain access into another person’s life. She’s no longer hindered by small talk – she can walk around a person as they’re talking for the optimal angle, or look back on pictures that so clearly capture emotional reactions. “Photography is very much a form of visual research,” she explains. While the connection between photography and traditional forms of academic research is not often drawn, the classic adage is classic for a reason: a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Matt of Matthew’s Chocolates in Hillsborough, photographed by Josephine Vonk

A pivotal moment for her occurred spring semester of her first year, when she shot a project centered around Matthew’s Chocolates in Hillsborough. As she went in week after week and built a rapport with the owner of the shop, she began to realize the importance of relationships in photography – “the emotional access and content you gain is a lot better.”

But perhaps her favorite project, she says, was a series she shot for DOCST 119S centered around femininity and the beauty of the female body. Aiming to reframe how the media views females by utilizing the female gaze, she ran into a lot of ethical issues such as consent and what she could and couldn’t shoot. In the process, though, she realized the power she held as a photographer: she set the groundwork, and she established the nature of the project. “The camera is invasive,” she reflected. Through her Canon, she can portray people in ways that they don’t even see themselves. But it was ultimately rewarding; the purpose of her project was to highlight the unique beauty of each of her subjects. And therein lies the power of photography:it serves as a third eye, an alternate way of seeing the world that causes us to pause and think.

Vonk described herself as a “freaky Psych major” – intensely passionate about the ways that humans function and interact with each other and themselves. For her, photography is just “another tool in my belt to ask questions and gain access.” And true to that sentiment, the diversity of her projects show that photography has allowed her to ask and answer questions about life, through a camera lens.

New Blogger Skylar Hughes: ‘Up for the Challenge’

By Skylar Hughes

On September 18, 2021

In Biology, Policy, Science Communication & Education, Students

When I was a young girl, My mother once explained to me the importance of a first impression. “You can only make it once, after all,” she’d say. Here I am writing this introduction for you guys, and her words echo in my mind, so I’ll give it my best shot.

Hi, my name is Skylar Hughes, and I’m a part of the class of 2025. Atlanta, Georgia, is where I call home, and from my slang to my walk, it’s quite obvious where I grew up. I’m the person who will talk to everyone and is not at all afraid to speak her mind. A random fun fact about me is that I was actually on the Ellen Show in January!! (kind of cool, right?) It still feels unreal that I am here, and you will most likely see me wandering around lost one day like the freshman I am. My major is undecided, but currently I am between Marine Science and Public Policy. (confused isn’t even the word. )

I’m still in shock from this… https://youtu.be/OivXTYYiUj4

Marine science was my first love, the major that I’ve had a crush on since middle school, and invested countless hours researching online and through documentaries. I even went to a Duke TIP marine science program in the Gulf of Mexico my sophomore year of high school and loved every second of it. I’ve watched every episode of Deep Blue on National Geographic and probably know more than a person should about coral reefs. But public policy? That was like my celebrity crush, the major I eyed from a distance and really admired, but never had the privilege to closely interact with. I remember watching figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams dominate the field with their intelligence, being the change they wanted to see in their communities, and I was hooked. As a teenager, I often found myself frustrated with government decisions and realized that public policy gave me the chance to make genuine change. I was sold.

So now here I am at Duke, which maintains an outstanding program for marine science AND public policy, and I am like a kid in a candy store. Along with hoping to figure my major out this year, I’m also planning on being involved with the Black Student Alliance here at Duke, as well as joining Duke’s Climate Change Coalition, and volunteering at the Geer Street Learning Garden.

For me, research blogs are a brilliant way to reach the masses with reliable information, research, and content that can be trusted, which is profoundly important to me. Education is the only process by which growth is made. Without education, we’re, in essence, doomed for retrogression. Education arms people with a weapon that cannot be stolen, one that can not only rid them of their current circumstances but be a guiding light towards their desired ones.

Education refines new ideas, which are the only reasons man is not still living in caves and figuring out fire. The education of one can be utilized to educate another, creating a snowball effect of intellect that cannot be restrained. An educated population leads to educated decisions in society, which leads to educated leaders in office, leading to more authentic community at Duke, in Durham, and beyond.

Sunset view from one of my favorite spots in Atlanta: Stone Mountain!

I take great pleasure in writing, and it was one of the few activities in school that I viewed as a stress reliever instead of a stressor. In a society as dynamic and saturated as the one we’re submerged in, research blogs are essential. Durham represents such a culturally rich and diverse community with so many stories to tell and issues to be brought to light. There are people from all ranges of socioeconomic status, gender, race, and religion, with narratives that are worth their weight in gold. I can only imagine the growth as an intellectual and the valuable experience gained with this position, and I am up for the challenge.

Post by Skylar Hughes, Class of 2025

A Virtual Stroll through the 2021 Bass Connections Showcase

By Meghna Datta

On April 23, 2021

In Art, Behavior/Psychology, Climate/Global Change, Field Research, Neuroscience, Science Communication & Education, Students

Posters, presentations, and formalwear: despite the challenge of a virtual environment, this year’s annual Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase still represented the same exciting scholarship and collegiality as it has in years past.

While individuals could no longer walk around to see each of this year’s 70+ teams present in person, they were instead able to navigate a virtual hall with “floors” designated for certain teams. With labels on each virtual table, it almost mimicked the freedom of leisurely strolls down a hall lined with posters, stopping at what catches your eye. Three sessions were held over Thursday, April 15 and Friday, April 16.

The beginning of each session featured five-minute “lightning” presentations by a diverse set of teams, representing the range of research that students and faculty participated in. One such presentation was lead by Juhi Dattani ’22 (NCSU) and Annie Roberts ’21, who covered research generated by their team, “Regenerative Grazing to Mitigate Climate Change.” The team was an inter-institutional project bringing together UNC, NCCU, NCSU, and Duke. And as they aptly summarized, “It’s not the cow, but how.” Cows can help fight instead of contribute to the climate crisis, through utilizing regenerative grazing – which is an indigenous practice that has been around for hundreds of years – to improve soil health and boost plant growth.

The team during the 2019-2020 year, pre-COVID, on the Triangle Land Conservancy’s Williamson Preserve.

Research is not just relegated to the physical sciences. Brittany Forniotis, a PhD candidate ’26, and Emma Rand ’22 represented the team “Mapping History: Seeing Premodern Cartography through GIS and Gaming.” Their team was as interdisciplinary as it gets, drawing from the skills of individuals in everything from art history to geography to computer science. They posited that mapmakers use features of map to argue how people should see the world, not necessarily how they saw the world. To defend this hypothesis, they annotated maps to record and categorize data and even converted maps to 3D to make them virtual, explorable worlds. The work of this team enabled the launch of Sandcastle, which aims to “enable researchers to visualize non-cartesian, premodern images of places in a comparative environment that resembles the gestural, malleable one used by medieval and early modern cartographers and artists.”

The work of the team added to a project launch of Sandcastle.

Sophie Hurewitz (T ’22) and Elizabeth Jones (MPP ’22) presented on behalf of the “North Carolina Early Childhood Action Plan: Evidence-based Policy Solutions”, Their recommendations for alleviating childhood food insecurity in North Carolina as outlined by the North Carolina Early Childhood Action Plan will provide a roadmap for NC Integrated Care for Kids (NC InCK) to consider certain policy changes.

One of the most remarkable parts of Bass Connections is how it opens doors for students to pursue avenues and opportunities that they may have never been exposed to otherwise. Hurewitz said that “Being a part of this team led me and a team member to apply for the 2021 Bass Connections Student Research Award, which we were ultimately awarded to study the barriers and facilitators to early childhood diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) among Black and Latinx children in North Carolina.” In addition to the award, Hurewitz and fellow team member Ainsley Buck were able to present their team’s research at the APA Region IV Annual Meeting.

From gene therapy for Alzheimer’s disease to power grids on the African continent, this year’s teams represented a wide range of research and collaboration. Erica Langan ’22, a member of the team “REGAIN: Roadmap for Evaluating Goals in Advanced Illness Navigation”, said that “For me, Bass Connections has been an extraordinary way to dive into interdisciplinary research. It’s an environment where I can bring my existing skills and knowledge to the table and also learn and grow in new ways.” This interdisciplinary thinking is a hallmark of not just Bass Connections, but Duke as a research institution, and it’s clear that this spirit is alive and well, even virtually.

Post by Meghna Datta

Are You Funnier Than a Duke Postdoc?

By Rebecca Williamson

On April 12, 2021

In Art, Students

Odds are, probably not.

On Saturday, April 10th, Duke Postdoc Comedy Club hosted Are We There Yet?, a virtual comedy showcase featuring Triangle-based comedians. The show was moderated by Bo Ma and featured six comics: Tori Grace Nichols, Amy Mora, Josh Rosenstein, Nat Davis, Yutian Feng, and headliner Isatu Kamara (in order of appearance).

The virtual comedy club was sponsored by the Duke Office of Research, The Graduate School, and the Division of Student Affairs, who collectively scraped together a whopping $15 to pay each of the up-and-coming comedians, giving the audience their first laugh of the night. Let’s see $8 billion endowment… subtract the product of 15 times 6… carry the one… wait, how many zeroes is that again? Good one, Duke.

Given that the show was free, I definitely felt like I got a lot more than I paid for.

I was shocked at how many of the performers had prior comedy experience in the community; almost all of the comics had extensive performance resumes both in Durham and outside of the Triangle area. Prevalent themes of the night included jokes related to gender and racial identity, COVID-induced weight gains (dubbed by Amy Mora as the “quarantine fifteen”), and the less than prolific employment prospects currently awaiting postdoctoral students.

Yutian Feng’s setup for *Are We There Yet?*. Tropical paradise or kitchen island? Guess we’ll never know…

One of the highlights of the show was radiology postdoc Yutian Feng’s set. A self-described PhD, which he clarified stood for “permanent head damage,” his hobbies included identifying as a straight white male “because it’s the only way to get elected in this country,” and conversing with Siri on his Apple Watch, which he has programmed to congratulate him with a salty profanity every time he finishes exercising. After watching his set, all I can think to say is congratulations (salty profanity) — being that funny must’ve been quite the workout!

Isatu Kamara and Jimmy Carter (vaguely visible on her left).

The show’s headliner was Isatu Kamara, an up-and-coming Durham-based comedian who tuned in alongside her cat, Jimmy Carter.

Kamara’s set revolved around her identities, particularly as a “stay-at-home daughter” and non-rich person, lamenting about the recent invasion of “gentrification scooters” and the sunroom epidemic in Durham.

Future plans? Kamara hopes to upgrade from the shopping cart that they have at the grocery store specifically for single people. You know, the one that’s “half of the size of the Happy Family™ shopping cart” and only has room for “a pack of White Claws, a bottle of wine, and some cat food?” A very ambitious goal but, hey, we’re rooting for you, Isatu.

Though the fruits of their research careers remain unknown, the comedic future seems promising for the Postdoc Comedy Club’s self-described “two to three” members. After all, as Yutian aptly pointed out during his set, they all have the opportunity to move “from the most underpaid job to the second most underpaid job” — a drop in the bucket when compared to their masses of student debt and cure their similarly high degrees of self-loathing, but hey, at least they got fifteen bucks?

Post by Rebecca Williamson

Duke Senior Mixes Memory Research with Criminal Justice Reform

By Cydney Livingston

On March 26, 2021

In Behavior/Psychology, Neuroscience, Policy, Students

What do you get when you mix double majors in Philosophy and Psychology with a certificate in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics? You get someone like Kelis Johnson, a junior from Lithonia, Georgia in suburban Atlanta, who works in not one research lab at Duke, but two.

Kelis is a member of The Marsh Lab studying learning and memory in Psychology and Neuroscience, and The Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, using legal and scientific research to advance criminal justice reform.

Kelis Johnson, member of the Marsh Lab and the Wilson Center for Science and Justice

“Managing two research assistant positions while working as an embedded writing consultant with the Thompson Writing Studio, on top of my academics, can definitely be a challenge,” Kelis says. But, she said, “The way that I have been able to manage these positions along with the rest of my busy schedule is cohesion: Although working in a lab provides a different context than the material from my classes, I think my lab work and classwork supplement one another in a profound way.”

After taking a class with Elizabeth Marsh, the lab’s Principal Investigator, Kelis found herself “interested in deepening [her] knowledge of and experience with memory research,” so she reached out to get involved in the summer of 2020. The lab has provided her a means to explore her interests in the “intersections between memory and personal identity, education and the law.”

Simultaneously, in the midst of the (first) Covid-19 summer, Kelis worked with the Microworlds Lab. She conducted historical research that profiled Black female activists. “I felt like my interests and passions began to converge on activism and bringing about change while also exploring empirical research,” she said, “This passion aligned with the work being done at the Wilson Center who use research to advance civil rights.” She joined her second lab in the fall of 2020.

Dr. Elizabeth Marsh surrounded by research assistants of the Marsh Lab

In both positions, Kelis meets weekly with her fellow colleagues to discuss an overview of the labs work or the current research in the field. She finds this fulfilling, knowing that the work she and fellow research assistants have contributed to is providing “concrete advancements … in the labs and the world more broadly.” Kelis’ work consists mostly of coding or scoring data. This means reading study participants’ responses and using a codebook (like a grading rubric) to determine how each response compares to the standard established in the experimental protocol. Kelis also participates in literature reviews and stimuli creation, where she generates relevant material such as questions, statements, or images that will be used in experiments to test research questions.

This work has enabled Kelis to meet fellow undergraduates, along with graduate students and faculty mentors, who have similar interests to her own. She has learned more about grant writing, research ethics, and statistical tools. Along with providing her invaluable research experience, strengthening her passions for criminal justice reform, and reinforcing her plans to go to law school following graduation from Duke, through her work with the Wilson Center, Kelis has been able to learn more about Durham and North Carolina. This prompted her to think deeper about her role in the larger communities around her.

Image of Duke Law School, where the Wilson Center is located.

Kelis’ research is valuable outside of the lab. “Memory research is essential to how we learn, how we structure our life and personal identity, and how we form relationships with others,” Kelis said. She also stated that, “Learning about and reforming our criminal justice system is something we must all care about. In order to attack the systematic oppression of marginalized groups, we have to understand it.”

Unfortunately, due to Covid-19, Kelis has been unable to participate in person with either of her labs. This is something she is emphatically looking forward to. However, the virtual realm has enabled other forms of meaningful interactions and experiences through digital platforms. Kelis says she really appreciates “the events hosted by the [Wilson Center] Lab that often feature exonerated individuals who speak about their experience within the criminal justice system.”

Kelis’ contributions to projects from memory difference in older and younger adults to autobiographical memory are surely only the first steps in a planned lifetime of standing at the intersection between memory, identity, and the structures of our society.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Meet a Duke Senior at the Intersection Of Computation, Neuroscience and T-Pain

By Anna Gotskind

On March 15, 2021

In Behavior/Psychology, Computers/Technology, Neuroscience, Students

As Daniel Sprague ‘21 prepares to graduate from Duke this Spring with a double major in Computer Science and Neuroscience, I had the opportunity to interview him on his undergraduate research experience. In his final semester, Sprague reflects on what he accomplished and learned in the three research labs he was a part of over his four years at Duke.

Outside of the lab, Sprague is also active in the arts community at Duke. He has been a member of Hoof ‘n’ Horn since his freshman year and has performed in four student-run musical theater productions. He is also a part of Speak of the Devil, one of Duke’s acapella groups that he was the president of during his Junior year. Recently, a video they uploaded more than two years ago has picked up speed and acquired over 150,000 views on YouTube. I think it’s fair to say Sprague is even more than a triple threat.

Sprague was interested in neuroscience and biology before he came to Duke and knew he wanted to participate in undergraduate research when he arrived. His first year, planning on pursuing pre-med, he joined Rima Fathi Kaddurah-Daouk’s lab where he worked with metabolomics, the large-scale study of small molecules within cells, biofluids, tissues, or organisms as it relates to neuropsychiatric disorders. While he learned a lot and enjoyed working in this lab, Sprague was eager to explore more.

The summer after his first year, Sprague was accepted to the Huang Fellows Program run by Duke’s Science & Society initiative.

Sprague described their focus as, “The way that research, science, communication, and medicine interact with social issues and ethics.”

As a part of the program, Sprague was matched and placed in Ornit Chiba-Falek’s lab. There he conducted work in genomics and neuroscience, centered around neurodegenerative diseases, specifically, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. His job involved processing mouse brains to extract neurons for genomic sequencing. From there, the lab would conduct genome-wide association studies to correlate specific human or animal genotypes with genetic markers.

“We were trying to identify SNPs (Single-nucleotide polymorphism) which are single base pair variations in a genome that correlated with Alzheimer’s” Sprague explained

Along with working in a lab, Sprague also attended research seminars, learned about how science publishing works, and participated in a science symposium at the culmination of the summer experience.

Daniel Sprague presents his research at Duke Science and Society’s Huang Fellows Program Poster Session

“Research is a slow iterative process and it rarely ever works how you expect it to.”
Daniel sprague

Sprague continued working in the Chiba-Falek lab through his sophomore year and contributed to the publication of two research papers: Shared genetic etiology underlying Alzheimer’s disease and major depressive disorder and Bioinformatics strategy to advance the interpretation of Alzheimer’s disease GWAS discoveries: The roads from association to causation. However, partway through the year, he realized he missed math and computational thinking. He began taking more math and computer science classes. After learning more, he realized he really wanted to find a lab doing research at the intersection of computation, math, and neuroscience.

Junior year brought Sprague to the John Pearson’s Lab where they build modeling and analysis tools for brain data.

He also began taking courses in machine learning which he brought into his lab work. His role involved working on the lab’s code base and aiding in the development of a software system for analyzing the brain. He was specifically looking at calcium imaging data. Sprague explained that there are a lot of different ways to do neuroimaging and visualize brain cell function. His work involved using fluorescent calcium.

“When brain cells spike, they release a fluorescent calcium trace that we can visualize with a camera to detect brian cell function with a high degree of temporal and spatial specificity,” Sprague said. “This allows us to accurately detect brain cell function on a millisecond and single cell scale.”

In many neuroscience studies, a stimulus is presented to an organism and the response is observed. The Pearson lab wants to be able to dynamically adjust which stimulus they present based on the intermediary results during the experiment.

“A big limitation in neuroscience research is it just has an absurd amount of data, even for a very small organism,” Sprague said. “Even a couple thousand brain cells will provide so much data that it can’t be visualized or analyzed quick enough to adjust the experiment in ways that would improve it.”

As a result of this limitation, they are trying to adapt conventional computational neuroscience methods to be used in an “online fashion,” which means working with the data as it comes in. Ultimately, they are developing methods to analyze data that traditionally would take hours due to computational time and trying to condense it to a millisecond.

“There are a lot of similar problems that computer scientists work on, but they focus on theoretical analyses of types of functions and how mathematical functions work. What’s cool about this is that it’s very applied with the constraints of a biological system and also requires knowledge of multiple disciplines.”
daniel sprague

Sprague will continue to apply these skills as he begins working next year as an associate consultant at Bain & Company in San Francisco. He is very interested in the connection between science, tech, and society.

Additionally, he is hoping to learn more about how artificial intelligence and machine learning are used in industry as well as their future directions, ethical dilemmas, and legal considerations. Consulting is becoming an increasingly data-driven industry and Sprague hopes to continue developing his domain knowledge and work with these ideas in an applied setting.

As Sprague prepares to leave Duke he reflects on his time here and the research he has had the opportunity to participate in.

“One thing I’m grateful for is having the chance to have different experiences but still settle into one lab for two years. Don’t be afraid to get involved early, and don’t feel like you have to stay in the same lab for four years.”
daniel Sprague

Post by Anna Gotskind

Bass Connections Teams Tackling COVID-19 Problems, from Food Security to Voting-by-Mail

By Meghna Datta

On March 8, 2021

In Field Research, Global Health, Policy, Students

Most people at Duke are familiar with Bass Connections, the powerhouse interdisciplinary research program that brings together students and faculty from a wide variety of backgrounds to tackle complex problems.

Like most people, when the country went on COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, team leaders and members within Bass Connections needed to adapt their approach.

Instead of merely adapting, though, some Bass Connections teams saw a problem-solving opportunity. They pivoted to address some of the most pressing problems that the pandemic has created or exacerbated. On Tuesday, March 2^nd, eight teams gathered to present their research at the first Bass Connections Works in Progress Symposium.

Equity and Efficiency of Using Wearables Data for COVID-19 Monitoring was one team that presented at the Symposium.

These teams tackled issues ranging from the ethics of contact tracing to the availability and access to contraception.

One team focused on the issue of food security amongst Latinx populations in Durham. Their presentation was lead by Elaijah Lapay, Faraan Rahim, and Karina Moreno Bueno. The team aimed to tackle three major goals: “How is the pandemic affecting the food security of Latinx residents, and how do environmental public health factors contribute to this population’s risk for COVID-19 infection? How does the incorporation of fresh, local foods mitigate these effects? How is the pandemic affecting the food assistance services locally, nationally, and internationally for the Latinx community?”

Of the Hispanic/Latinx respondents to the 2019 Durham Community Health Survey, 20.9% said they sometimes skipped or limited their meals. Combining that with the fact that 36% of the total number of COVID-19 cases in Durham have been within the Hispanic population, it’s fairly clear that there is a link between food security and health outcomes.

To this end, the Bass Connections team partnered with Root Causes to help advance their project goals through Root Cause’s Fresh Produce Program. Root Causes is an organization started by Duke Medical School students prior to the pandemic that previously provided fresh produce to food-insecure patients at the Duke Outpatient Clinic. But in order to adapt to contactless delivery and new needs due to COVID-19, Root Causes and the Bass team partnered to expand its reach to nearly 150 households in Durham.

Pipeline for Fresh Produce Program, taken from the symposium presentation of Improving Food Security to Increase Resiliency to COVID-19 for Latinx Populations

This expansion was aided immensely by the Duke Campus Farm, which despite the pandemic mobilized to change the produce it grew to be more culturally relevant to the households they were supporting.

In the future, the team hopes to continue to expand their survey data in the Triangle and continue to assess the impact of the Fresh Produce Program.

Another Bass Connections team broadly addressed the challenges COVID-19 posed to the election process, through three sub-projects focusing on absentee balloting, organizing, and overall voter participation. The symposium presentation for the absentee balloting research was lead by Chase Johnson, Emma Shokeir, and Kathryn Thomas.

To hear more about the work of this Bass Connections team, watch the presentation above.

The 2020 election saw more people than ever relying on absentee voting, either by the one-stop process or by voting through mail. However, this team aimed to address the many voters that are disenfranchised because their votes are rejected due to errors in their ballot. While NC courts ruled that voters are required to be notified if their ballot needs curing, the difficulty of curing one’s ballot often dissuades people from even starting the process, leading to those votes not being counted.

The team utilized the app BallotTrax, a company that the North Carolina State Board of Elections hired to track these ballots. The team then focused on phone banking to increase BallotTrax usage, and then analyzed voter outcomes.

In the future, they hope to analyze the effect that BallotTrax outreach had on voting success, the efficacy of BallotTrax for voters in North Carolina, and the efficiency of North Carolina’s vote-by-mail system compared to other states.

A goal of this symposium for many teams was to ask audience members for suggestions on ways to direct their research further. The beauty of seeing research midway through the process is that it opens the door for collaborative thinking, out-of-the-box ideas, and being open about obstacles and mistakes.

This virtual Symposium is a testament not just to Duke’s collaborative research spirit, which is alive and well despite the pandemic, but to the adaptability of Duke student researchers and faculty. There’s no doubt that these eight Bass Connections Teams, among the many other teams part of the program this year, have been generating relevant and impactful knowledge and will continue to do so.

Post by Meghna Datta

Student Team Quantifies Housing Discrimination in Durham

By Cydney Livingston

On February 9, 2021

In Business/Economics, Data, Field Research, Statistics, Students

Home values and race have an intimate connection in Durham, NC. From 1940 to 2020, if mean home values in Black-majority Census tracts had appreciated at rates equal to those in white Census tracts, the mean home value for homes in Black tracts would be $94,642 higher than it is.

That’s the disappointing, but perhaps not shocking, finding of a Duke Data+ team.

Because housing accounts for the biggest portion of wealth for families that fall outside of the top 10% of wealth in the U.S., this figure on home values represents a pervasive racial divide in wealth.

What started as a Data+ project in the summer of 2020 has expanded into an ongoing exploration of the connection between persistent wealth disparities across racial lines through housing. Omer Ali (Ph.D.), a postdoctoral associate with The Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity, is leading undergraduates Nicholas Datto and Pei Yi Zhuo in the continuation of their initial work. The trio presented an in-depth analysis of their work and methods Friday, February 5^th during a Data Dialogue.

Left to right: Omer Ali, Nicholas Datto, Pei Yi Zhuo

The team used a multitude of data to conduct their analyses, including the 1940 Census, Durham County records, CoreLogic data for home sales and NC voter registrations. Aside from the nearly $100,000 difference between mean home values between Black census tracts (defined as >50% Black homeowners from 1940-2020) and white census tracts (defined as >50% white homeowners from 1940-2020), Ali, Datto, and Zhou also found that over the last 10 years, home values have risen in Black neighborhoods as they have been losing Black residents. Within Census tracts, the team said that Black home-buyers in Durham occupy the least valuable homes.

Datto introduced the concept of redlining — systemic housing discrimination — and explained how this historic issue persists. From 1930-1940, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) designated certain neighborhoods unsuitable for mortgage lending. Neighborhoods were given a desirability grade from A to D, with D being the lowest.

In 1940, no neighborhoods with Black residents were designated as either A or B districts. That meant areas with non-white residents were considered more risky and thus less likely to receive FHA-guaranteed mortgages.

Datto explained that these historic classifications persist because the team found significant differences in the amount of accumulated home value over time by neighborhood rating. We are “seeing long-lasting effects of these redlined maps on homeowners in Durham, “ said Datto, with even “significant differences between white [and non-white] homeowners, even in C and D neighborhoods.”

Zhou explained the significance of tracking the changes of each Census tract – Black, white, or integrated – over the last 50 years. The “white-black disparity [in home value] has grown by 287%” in this time period, he said. Homes of comparable structural design and apparent worth are much less valuable for simply existing in Black neighborhoods and being owned by Black people. And the problem has only expanded.

Along with differences in home value, both Black and white neighborhoods have seen a decline in Black homeowners in the 21^st Century, pointing to a larger issue at hand. Though the work done so far merely documents these trends, rather than looking for correlation that may get at the underlying causes of the home-value disparity, the trends pair closely with other regions across the country being impacted by gentrification.

“Home values are going up in Black neighborhoods, but the number of Black people in those neighborhoods is going down,” said Datto.

Ali pointed out that there are evaluation practices that include evaluation of the neighborhood “as opposed to the structural properties of the home.” When a house is being evaluated, he said a home of similar structure owned by white homeowners would never be chosen as a comparator for a Latinx- or Black-owned home. This perpetuates historical disparities, as “minority neighborhoods have been historically undervalued” it is a compounding, systemic cycle.

The team hopes to export their methodology to a much larger scale. Thus far, this has presented some back-end issues with data and computer science, however “there is nothing in the analysis itself that couldn’t be [applied to other geographical locations,” they said.

Large socioeconomic racial disparities prevail in the U.S., from gaps in unemployment to infant mortality to incarceration rates to life expectancy itself. Though it should come as no surprise that home-values represent another area of inequity, work like Ali, Datto, and Zhou are conducting needs more traction, support, and expansion.

Post by Cydney Livingston