Category: Students Page 9 of 42

Remembrance of Wordles Past

On February 1, 2022

Devang Thakkar, a fourth-year PhD candidate at Duke University, recently created an archive for Wordle that gives users unlimited access to past Wordle games. Gray tiles indicate letters not found anywhere in the correct word, yellow indicates letters that are in the word but not in the right place, and green indicates correctly placed letters.

Writing this story was dangerous. Before, I was only vaguely aware of the existence of Wordle, a wildly popular online word game created by Josh Wardle and recently bought by the New York Times. Now I can’t stop playing it. The objective of the game sounds deceptively simple: try to guess the right five-letter word in six attempts or fewer.

Thanks to Devang Thakkar, a fourth-year PhD student in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Duke, the 200+ Wordle games released before I discovered its charms are readily accessible online. So now I’m making up for lost time.

Thakkar recently spent a weekend building an archive of every Wordle game in existence. You can play them in any order. You can start at the beginning. You can start with today’s Wordle and work backward. You can sit down and play eight in a row. Just hypothetically, of course.

Devang Thakkar became hooked on Wordle when his roommate introduced it to him, but he wanted a way to access old Wordles as well. First, he experimented with manually changing the date on his browser to trick the computer into showing him old Wordles. However, his browser gave him an error message if he tried to go back more than fourteen days. To get around that, Mr. Thakkar wrote a Python script using a Python library called Selenium, which allowed him “to basically go back as much as you want.”

Thakkar combined his own data with an open-source Wordle project called WordMaster created by Katherine Peterson. With an open-source project, Thakkar says, “You put your work out there, and then someone else adds to it.”

Devang Thakkar at the 2020 Data Through Design exhibition in New York.
Photograph courtesy of Devang Thakkar.

Whereas WordMaster randomly generates new five-letter words, Thakkar’s archive provides access to “official” Wordle games from the past. While there were many random Wordle generators already in existence, it was the usage of the official Wordle list and the ability to go back to a particular Wordle that set this archive apart. Thakkar also added features like the ability to share your answers with others and an option that lets users access Wordle games in a random order.

Thakkar tells me the project was “just for fun.” “I was bored… so I was like, ‘let’s make something!’” he says. Nevertheless, “That is essentially what I do for my work as well; I write code.” In the Dave Lab, Devang Thakkar uses sequencing data to study the origins of different types of lymphomas.

In his free time, Devang Thakkar enjoys woodworking and metalworking. Pictured here are two of his projects, a wooden bowl and his own dining room table.
Photographs courtesy of Devang Thakkar.

When he’s not working or making Wordle archives, Devang Thakkar can often be found in Duke’s Innovation Co-Lab, where he enjoys woodworking and metalworking. His projects range from creations intended as gifts, like a laptop stand and beer caddy, to his own dining room table. Thakkar says the hobby, being very different from his normal work, helps him maintain work-life balance.

The Wordle project, on the other hand, required coding skills Thakkar uses daily. “This is just like work for me, but for fun.” He enjoys graphic design and board games and has “a special affection for board games with words.”

As for the Wordle archive, Mr. Thakkar says he never expected it to become so popular. He thought it would mostly be used by his friends, but the archive quickly accumulated millions of weekly users. “People keep sending me screenshots of their friends sending them this website,” he says.

Meanwhile, I’ve started noticing Wordle references everywhere. Just after I spoke to Thakkar about his project, I happened to stumble across a link to BRDL, a delightful Wordle spinoff that uses four-letter birding codes instead of words. By blind luck, I guessed the right code on my second try: AMGO, American goldfinch. A few days later, I overheard two students talking about the daily Wordle. Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s become hooked on the game. Fortunately for everyone who is, Devang Thakkar’s Wordle archive, which he called “Remembrance of Wordles Past,” offers unlimited access.

Introducing Muser – A Better Way to Find Student Research

By Skylar Hughes

On January 26, 2022

In Field Research, Genetics/Genomics, History, Science Communication & Education, Students

An effortlessly simple research platform where Duke students and Duke research projects can connect? Yes, please!

If you are anything like me, Duke University’s incredible research opportunities were extremely enticing when considering this school. One of the top 10 research institutions in the United States, Duke University’s research community spends over 1 billion dollars annually to fund its projects, which includes notable research facilities like the Duke Center for Human Genetics, the Duke Cancer Institute, the Duke Center for AIDS Research, and the Duke Human Vaccine Institute.

However, the amount of opportunity in this area can be overwhelming to approach, and as a student you often have no clue where to start.

*Summer undergraduate research in cancer biology at the Duke University School of Medicine.*

That’s where Muser comes in.

Muser is a website created by Sheila Patek, a Duke biology professor who used grant money from the National Science Foundation to create a more equitable and straightforward way to connect undergraduates with professors with research opportunities. The resource allows researchers to post ongoing research positions with a direct application through the website.

Muser can sort research projects by compensation, hours, year, and project category, simplifying Duke’s incredibly complex research community by a lot.

“Muser posts research projects in 4 rounds throughout the year, a Fall round (August), a late Fall round for Spring projects (October/November), a Spring round for Summer projects (February/March), and a Spring round for Fall projects (March/April),” according to its website. Muser makes it easy to accommodate research positions into the part of your semester that works with your busy schedule.

I connected with some Duke students who have found success with the growing research platform, and though their interests were diverse, the success was all-encompassing.

“My experience with my Muser Project for the summer of 2021 was great overall,” said Elaijah Lapay, class of 2025. “It was essentially a history research assistantship helping a professor in the history department conduct research on elderly and eldercare in North Carolina. I was able to go to the NC State archives as well as archives across eastern North Carolina to really dive into the question of treatment of the elderly during the 20th century.”

Lapay’s research is so fruitful that the professor, James Chappel, the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History, is continuing to pursue this project for the rest of the school year. “I truly felt one-of-a-kind… I definitely feel like I’ve learned a lot and it’s sparked a passion in me for geriatrics and eldercare.”

*A look inside Dr. Laurie Sanders’s lab here at Duke University.*

“I got the chance to work in the Sanders lab under principal investigator Dr. Laurie Sanders and post-doctorate Dr.Claudia Gonzalez-Hunt!” said Shreya Goel, class of 2025. This lab was the first to link a genetic mutation to mitochondrial DNA damage which was ultimately discovered to be a marker for sporadic Parkinson’s disease.

“I get to work with human cells to induce and track mitochondrial and nuclear DNA mutations to determine their effect on the progression of the cell cycle,” Goel said. Her research position is making a difference and it allows her to gain tangible experience in a field she is passionate about.

The success stories are copious, and the opportunity that this platform has brought to prodigious students like these is without question.

At a billion-dollar research school, understanding where to begin can be intimidating. Muser alleviates these worries by connecting researchers and students through an accessible platform.

Have more questions? Visit Muser’s FAQ page to get more information and get into contact with one of Muser’s staff.

Blake Fauskee and the ‘Little Typos’ of Fern DNA

By Cydney Livingston

On January 21, 2022

In Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Students

Blake Fauskee, third-year Biology PhD student, initially pitched his graduate project to advisor Kathleen Pryer (Ph.D.) as an undergrad.

Fauskee, who researches RNA editing sites in ferns, told me about the project that he’s been working on for the last several years. His research could push back against the idea that DNA is the end-all, be-all molecule for encoding life as we know it.

Fauskee broke down RNA editing for me. “RNA editing is this extra step in the whole central dogma, the whole gene expression process, that happens in plant organellar DNA,” he said. This process takes place in plant mitochondrial and chloroplast genomes.

Fauskee uses a lot of metaphors to describe his work, which I find both helpful and admirable. Science can often be dense and lack feasible connections to processes that most of us are familiar with. “Basically, in [plant] DNA, there are little typos almost. The wrong nucleotide is encoded at certain spots. When those genes are going to be expressed, they get turned into RNA and then other proteins from the nucleus come in and find the little typos so that in the end you get the correct protein.”

This image shows a simplified diagram of how RNA editing works.

Fauskee calls RNA editing an “interesting and strange process” that neither animals nor humans have. His work attempts to study the evolution of this process, the patterns of RNA editing, and why it came to be. He uses DNA and RNA sequence data and the help of computational tools to do his work. He explains that when sequencing DNA, you can think of the fragmented base pairs “as little puzzle pieces.”

“So, I take all those little puzzle pieces and try to put back together the chloroplast genome, which is about 150,000 base pairs. It’s like a thousand-piece puzzle.”

Next, he figures out where the fern’s gene sequences are on the DNA strands, making use of genomic databases that contain known genomes. He then aligns RNA sequences to the genes he has mapped. Fauskee looks for the “typos” or “little differences” between the DNA and RNA: “That’s how we find the RNA editing sites.” Finally, he evaluates how the proteins would be changed by the typos in the DNA if the RNA was not edited after being transcribed.

“So, a lot of these fern genes will have a STOP codon right in the middle, which is really, really bad if you don’t fix because you are only going to get half a protein,” Fauskee said. STOP codons signal to the protein-building ribosomes that the protein is finished once it reads this portion of the RNA. Fauskee explained that these types of errors are the ones would expect organisms to lose, but it turns out they are the ones that are conserved in ferns. “Is there an extra function there? Is it helpful? Is it adaptive?” Fauskee asked.

Comparative analyses between fern species are important. By looking at whether there are common editing sites and common amino acid changes, Fauskee says, “we’re trying to understand if certain editing sites may be advantageous and what kinds of fluctuation we see between certain types of changes.”

Fauskee underscored the importance of his work. “RNA editing is a really interesting process that kind of undermines what I learned in molecular biology…They always tell you DNA is the bedrock, it’s the be-all, end-all. But what happens when the DNA is wrong? What’s the other added layer on this?”

Simply put, Fauskee, says that because of RNA editing, “We have to rethink central dogma a little bit.” In some plants, 10% of all their gene products contribute to RNA editing, Fauskee tells me. “That’s a big chunk and that’s got to be important,” Fauskee said, “Why would evolution keep such a burden going?”

Biology’s central dogma is the idea that DNA is transcribed into RNA and then translated into proteins. RNA editing adds an extra step before translation and protein production.

There may also be implications for how RNA editing sites affect the way that genetic relationships are mapped through phylogenetics. If differences between the DNA of different species at RNA editing sites, this could be misleading. Though the DNA indicates a change in base pair, RNA editing could lead to the same output in protein despite the seeming change. “If you took [RNA editing] into account,” Fauskee says, “does it give you a different answer?”

Fauskee studies ferns because of the amount of editing sites found in these plants. While flowering plants have lost editing sites over time, ferns have not. “For RNA editing, you can look at all angiosperms (flowering plants) and for the whole chloroplast genome, they might have 30-50 RNA editing sites. When you get into ferns, that number jumps up to 300-500 and I am trying to understand why.”

Botanical science first captured Fauskee’s interest while he completed his undergraduate degree in his home state at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). As a sophomore at UMD, Fauskee was taken under the wing of Amanda Grusz (Ph.D.). Grusz received her PhD in biology from Duke and worked under Pryer during her own time at the university. “I’m like my advisor’s academic grandson, which is kind of funny.” Clara Howell, who is part of Fauskee’s PhD cohort and who I spoke with last Fall, is also an academic grandchild in her own lab.

Being an “academic grandson” has worked out well for Fauskee. His key advice to me for any person considering a PhD, “Make sure your advisor is not someone you just admire as a scientist, but as a person.” On a day-to-day basis, Fauskee says that advisor Katheen Pryer “is pretty hands off” but is also “one of the most supportive people ever. I’m pretty much the driver of my own ship. If I am falling off the road, she’ll push me back on the road, but she’ll give me freedom to swerve around on that road.”

Fauskee also emphasized a piece of wisdom that Pryer passed down to him. “If whatever you’ve got going on is working and everyone else is doing something different, who cares?” he said.

Though Fauskee says that “lab work can be frustrating,” getting his long analyses to run after wrangling lots of data is very rewarding. Fauskee, who does not have a background in coding or computer languages, likes to “tell people that [his] floor of biology combined is one competent coder.” When he’s not stealing bits of his biology neighbor’s code, Fauskee loves to attend Duke Basketball games and is a fan of the television show Survivor.

Post by Cydney Livingston, Class of 2022

A Conversation with Emily Levy, Soon-to-Be Biology PhD

By Cydney Livingston

On January 14, 2022

In Animals, Biology, Field Research, Students

Emily Levy studies how the physical and social environments that baboons experience affect their physiology and life outcomes. The Massachusetts native, who works under advisor Susan Alberts (PhD), is in the final year of her Biology PhD and will defend her thesis later this Spring.

Though Duke’s in-person classes have been delayed until next week, I caught up with Levy over Zoom. The wall of her home office displays a fascinating Russian map of Chicago from the cold war era that shows bridges with their weight capacity. Levy tells me that she had no idea how her husband, who is from Evanston, found the map.

Emily Levy, an almost-PhD in Duke Biology

Levy’s research stems from the Amboseli Baboon Research Project – a nearly 50-year-old, ongoing study of wild baboons in Kenya. Duke’s Alberts has been studying these baboons for over 35 years and is a renowned primatologist involved with the project. Alberts’ lab collaborates with field researchers in Kenya to receive data and samples that are imperative to much of their work.

“Something that I really appreciate about Susan and the way she runs the lab is that she starts first-year grad students on a starter project,” Levy told me. Following a discussion about Levy’s interests, this project led to her first work on dominance rank, stress levels, and what this means physiologically for baboons. Levy also “poked around” at how scientists study dominance rank and found that the methods used for assessing rank “matter a lot.”

In her more recent project, Levy is trying to figure out what early life environments mean for adulthood in baboons. “So, we know that baboons that experience a really harsh early life, if they survive to adulthood, have really, really reduced lifespans as adults – like half as long – as baboons that had no adverse events,” Levy said.

“I’m focusing on two hypotheses to get at what might be happening under the skin that could have something to do with longer term effects on health and mortality.” One hypothesis is that a tough early life environment, especially nutritional stress, could stunt baboon growth and impinge adult activities like foraging or maintaining dominance rank. The other hypothesis proposes that early life adversity disrupts immune development, leading to an immune system that is either always inflamed or produces an overpowering inflammatory response when a baboon does get sick.

The second hypothesis is one that has been supported by human research, but Levy’s preliminary results “are the exact opposite.” This highlights one facet of the importance of her research: Its implications and parallels to human health and mortality. But Levy says her research is also “cool because it’s just cool” and appreciates what her work may add to basic science beyond human application.

Images from *Scientific American’s* article about the Amboseli Baboon Research Project.

In her journey to Duke, Levy said that she “tried a few ways of studying” animals before arriving at the work she conducts now. Levy, who really liked animals, enjoyed time outside, and was “hooked on biology” in high school, began her undergraduate career at Williams College with this in mind. “In college, I took biology and neuroscience and then took animal behavior my sophomore year and was like Oooo, this is cool!,” Levy exclaimed with a big smile on her face, “And it felt sort of light-bulby.”

Along the journey to her PhD, Levy studied plants and insect pollinators and spent a few weeks in Madagascar in a tent filled with fleas. Though Levy said that these experiences of field work became “one of my favorite things about my job,” they also helped shape her trajectory as a scientist as she figured out which model systems and research questions “did and did not spark her joy.”

It was during her undergraduate thesis assessing social behavior in rats that she felt a strong “click” for studying social behavior in animals. Taking a couple years to work in a clinical research lab that conducted work on autism in humans, Levy enjoyed working on research to aid in special needs people. “But pretty quickly,” Levy said, “I was like, Alright, I don’t want to study humans for my whole life.”

“I’d basically been crossing things off my list up until this point,” Levy continued, “I now knew I wanted to study social animal behavior in non-human animals.” In her year away from research, Levy worked as an outdoor educator in Wyoming while she applied to grad school with this study plan in mind. Her time in Jackson Hole, Wyoming narrowed her interests even more, pushing her towards behavioral ecology because of her observation of an amazing, unbroken natural ecosystem.

Levy says she ultimately ended up at Duke because “the Baboon Project is amazing,” “Susan Alberts is amazing,” and “the Duke Biology Department is really wonderful.”

Images of Emily Levy conducting field work. On right, Levy is conducting field work in the Amboseli National Park in Southern Kenya.

While Levy enjoys working with Alberts and mentoring undergraduates, as well as using grant writing as a “fun way to develop really exciting ideas and hypotheses,” she also shared some of her frustrations with me. “Science is very slow — often, not always — and a project from start to finish takes a long time. And the publication process is so long. I struggle with that pace sometimes” Additionally, as someone who was raised to never take herself too seriously, Levy also said that she has felt a lot of pressure in grad school to take herself more seriously than she should as part of academic culture.

Levy loves teaching and her hope is to become a faculty member at a small liberal arts college or undergraduate institution following a post-doc, for which she is currently in the application process. Through this future work, Levy aspires to “bring undergrads through the scientific process.”

In her time away from the lab and science, Emily is an avid baker. “One of my goals in grad school has been to acknowledge and own what I am good at, and I know I am good at baking,” Levy said with a grin. Chocolate chip cookies are her specialty.

If she could give any aspiring science PhDs a word of advice, Levy offered that you should have fun and “pay attention to the non-intellectual, as well as intellectual, things that you enjoy most.” As exemplified by her path to figuring out what exactly it was in science that inspired her, Levy says not to worry as much about figuring out where you are going, and when, but reaping the lessons and insights of the experiences along the way.

*Post by Cydney Livingston, Class of 2022*

LowCostomy: the Low-Cost Colostomy Bag for Africa

By Camila Cordero

On January 11, 2022

In Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Cancer, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Global Health, Medicine, Students

It’s common for a Pratt engineering student like me to be surrounded by incredible individuals who work hard on their revolutionary projects. I am always in awe when I speak to my peers about their designs and processes.

So, I couldn’t help but talk to sophomore Joanna Peng about her project: LowCostomy.

Rising from the EGR101 class during her freshman year, the project is about building a low-cost colostomy bag — a device that collects excrement outside the patient after they’ve had their colon removed in surgery. Her device is intended for use in under-resourced Sub-Saharan Africa.

“The rates in colorectal cancer are rising in Africa, making this a global health issue,” Peng says. “This is a project to promote health care equality.”

The solution? Multiple plastic bags with recycled cloth and water bottles attached, and a beeswax buffer.

“We had to meet two criteria: it had to be low cost; our max being five cents. And the second criteria was that it had to be environmentally friendly. We decided to make this bag out of recycled materials,” Peng says.

For now, the team’s device has succeeded in all of their testing phases. From using their professor’s dog feces for odor testing, to running around Duke with the device wrapped around them for stability testing, the team now look forward to improving their device and testing procedures.

“We are now looking into clinical testing with the beeswax buffer to see whether or not it truly is comfortable and doesn’t cause other health problems,” Peng explains.

_{Poster with details of the team’s testing and procedures}

Peng’s group have worked long hours on their design, which didn’t go unnoticed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Out of the five prizes they give to university students to continue their research, the NIH awarded Peng and her peers a $15,000 prize for cancer device building. She is planning to use the money on clinical testing to take a step closer to their goal of bringing their device to Africa.

Peng shows an example of the beeswax port buffer (above). The design team of Amy Guan, Alanna Manfredini, Joanna Peng, and Darienne Rogers (L-R).

“All of us are still fiercely passionate about this project, so I’m excited,” Peng says. “There have been very few teams that have gotten this far, so we are in this no-man’s land where we are on our own.”

She and her team continue with their research in their EGR102 class, working diligently so that their ideas can become a reality and help those in need.

Post by Camila Cordero, Class of 2025

Junior Alec Morlote Pursues a Love for Biology Via Fruit Flies

By Meghna Datta

On January 5, 2022

In Biology, Medicine, Neuroscience, Students

As Alec Morlote emphasizes, he’s a Biology major because “I’m really interested in it. I’d definitely be a Biology major whether I was pre-med or not.”

Morlote, a Trinity junior from northern New Jersey, works in the lab of Dr. Pelin Volkan studying the neurobiology of fruit flies. Why fruit flies, of all things? Well, Morlote initially signed up for a research fellowship program during the summer following his freshman year.

Of course, in March of that year, COVID-19 happened, so Morlote ended up postponing his work to this past summer. He got paired with the Volkan lab because he didn’t want to work in an area of research that was very familiar to him.

“I wanted to use research as an opportunity to learn something completely new,” he said. The neurobiology of fruit flies hit the nail on the head.

The Volkan Lab is a cell biology and neurobiology lab that studies how social behavior, specifically courting, is affected by stimuli, using fruit flies as a model organism. Morlote’s specific project has to do with olfactory stimuli – the things flies smell. In flies, as he explained, one gene is responsible for courtship behavior in male flies. If you take out the olfactory receptor of the fly, however, that gene won’t be active.

Morlote is interested in seeing how the olfactory receptor is critical to the expression of this gene.

To do this, he has been working on imaging the antennae of flies – work he describes as “cool, but tedious.” It’s incredibly detailed work to pick apart the antenna off of such a tiny creature. Once isolated, neurotransmitters in the antenna that have been tagged with green fluorescent protein (GFP) light up, thus showing the expression pattern of all cells expressing the neurotransmitter.

Humans clearly don’t have as simplistic a courtship behavior as fruit flies, but the simplicity of the fruit fly makes it an incredibly valuable organism for studying neurobiology. All discoveries in humans initially started with some sort of watered-down version of the human anatomy, whether mice or in this case, fruit flies. Discoveries into the neurobiology and neuroplasticity of fruit flies just might yield significant discoveries into the neurobiology and neuroplasticity of the human brain.

When asked about his favorite and least favorite parts about his research, Morlote laughed.

“I don’t like doing work for three months and getting no results at all,” he remarked in reference to the initial work he started on this summer – but alas, such is the nature of scientific research. But he adds that the best part of research is getting results, any at all. And even no results can mean something.

Morlote’s poster from his summer research

Research was a way for Morlote to narrow his post-graduation plans. He knows now that he wants to pursue an MD, or possibly an MD/PhD. But initially, research was a way for him to see whether this was the path for him at all. When asked why he chose to be pre-med, Morlote said that “it just seemed like the most practical way to apply a love for science.” Biology is the science that he loves the most, and so being pre-med seemed like a no-brainer.

It’s also a family business. Both of Morlote’s parents are doctors, so medicine “is not unfamiliar territory to me.” Being Latin American, both his parents have worked extensively with Latin communities in New Jersey, which is work he hopes to emulate in the future.

Whether or not benchwork stays a part of his life, Morlote knows that he wants his career to involve research somehow. The way he sees it, “you’re doing the bare minimum if you’re just a doctor but you’re not trying to better medicine in some way.”

Contributing to research just might become his way.

Post by Meghna Datta, Class of 2023

The Most Important 26 Hours of My First Term at Duke

By Vibhav Nandagiri

On December 20, 2021

In Cancer, Global Health, Medicine, Policy, Students

As any first-year will tell you, the scramble for joining new clubs can be a daunting one. As the dust settled from the Involvement Fair, I looked at the fistful of flyers overflowing from my desk. One of these flyers stood out to me in particular: Student Collaborative on Health Policy (SCOHP). The program, backed by the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy, seeks to educate, serve, and research within the Duke and Durham community regarding the social, economic, and political determinants of health care.

Intrigued, I ventured to the Social Sciences building the following Sunday afternoon for their inaugural GBM. The event was lively, filled with a dizzying number of avenues for involvement. One such avenue that was the SCOHP-organized Health Policy Case Competition, advertised as a two-day team sprint to develop and pitch solutions to a pressing health care problem. The prizes were handsome: $1,000 for 1st place, $500 for 2nd place, and $250 for 3rd place, courtesy of the Margolis Center and RTI International. Furthermore, participants would be given access to mentors and industry leaders with vast experience in the area of public health.

Six teams, each consisting of three to five members, participated in the case-writing festivities. On Friday, September 10 at 5:00 PM, the case document was released. Our task: to develop a five-year plan aimed at increasing the screening for human papillomavirus (HPV) in either Malawi, South Africa, or Eswatini via a novel imaging technology known as microbeads. A considerably complex task given the vast number of social, institutional, and political barriers lying between the new technology and the women who needed it the most, not to mention the potential for HPV developing into cervical cancer if left undetected and untreated.

Our team, Team J, assumed the role of a local NGO partnering with the Eswatini government. The preliminary hours of the competition were spent sifting through a sea of research. We read reviews of tissue imaging technology, feasibility studies on drug distribution networks, and mathematical projections of healthcare costs. At once invigorating and ceaselessly frustrating, the process of developing a comprehensive solution required significant mental and physical rearrangement. The nine hours following the release of the case were spent in a variety of popular campus study spots, from Bostock to Rubenstein Library, The Coffeehouse to dorm common rooms. In the early morning hours, our plan had finally begun to take shape.

A meager five hours of rest separated Day One of the competition from Day Two. After a night of brainstorming and research, we were left with three hours to finalize our five-minute proposals before a hard 12:00 PM deadline. As the deadline approached, we changed into our best attire from the clavicle up (the marvels of Zoom) and sat down. For the next hour and change, ideas flowed thickly and quickly; eager and persuasive tones emanating from our screens, tense silence as the judges moved into breakout rooms for deliberation.

The top three teams, Team J included, were selected for a final presentation round. The guidelines for this round: strengthen the argument, lengthen the presentation. We were in the final stretch. What followed was two hours of remarkably focused work, the likes of which I had never experienced in a team setting. As we sat down for the deciding presentation of the competition, I felt an immense sense of pride, not only in our solution, but also in our twenty-six hour transformations from perplexed receivers to confident presenters. This confidence and breadth of knowledge was visible in all three teams over the course of their fifteen-minute presentations and subsequent five-minute Q&A’s.

Team J’s Final Round Presentation Over Zoom

As the clock struck 7:00 PM on Saturday, September 11, the judges had submitted their verdict, at which point the teams turned towards the screen with rapt attention. The SCOHP organizers began reading the final standings. In what was described as an extremely close decision for the judges, Team J ended up winning first place. Battling the equally powerful forces of disbelief and sleep deprivation, we let out a collective breath. It was all over.

At the time of the competition, I had yet to complete a month at Duke. I didn’t know it then, but those twenty-six hours would end up being some of the most impactful in my first semester. The competition offered an entirely different approach to learning, one that was grounded in interdisciplinary inquiry and effective collaboration. And to think–it all started with a flyer buried underneath many other flyers.

Post by Vibhav Nandagiri, Class of 2025

Decentralized Finance and the Power of Smart Contracts

By Anna Gotskind

On December 13, 2021

In Artificial Intelligence, Business/Economics, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Faculty, Students

When people use apps or services like Netflix, Instagram, Amazon, etc. they sign, or rather virtually accept, digital user agreements. Digital agreements have been around since the 1990s. These agreements are written and enforced by the institutions that create these services and products. However, in certain conditions, these systems fail and these digital or service-level agreements can be breached, causing people to feel robbed.

A recent example of this is the Robinhood scandal that occurred in mid-2021. Essentially, people came together and all wanted to buy the same stock. However, Robinhood ended up restricting buying, citing issues with volatile stock and regulatory agreements. As a result, they ended up paying $70 million dollars in fines for system outages and misleading customers. And individual customers were left feeling robbed. This was partially the result of centralization and Robinhood having full control over the platform as well as enforcing the digital agreement.

Zak Ayesh Presenting on Chainlink
and Decentralized Smart Contracts

Zak Ayesh, a developer advocate at Chainlink recently came to Duke to talk about decentralized Smart Contracts that could solve many of the problems with current centralized digital agreements and traditional paper contracts as well.

What makes smart contracts unique is that they programmatically implement a series of if-then rules without the need for a third-party human interaction. While currently these are primarily being used on blockchains, they were actually created by computer scientist Nick Szabo in 1994. Most smart contracts now run on blockchains because it allows them to remain decentralized and transparent. If unfamiliar with blockchain refer to my previous article here.

Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement being directly written into computer code.
Zak Ayesh

There are several benefits to decentralized contracts. The first is transparency. Because every action on a blockchain is recorded and publicly available, the enforcement of smart contracts is unavoidably built-in. Next is trust minimization and guaranteed execution. With smart contracts, there is reduced counterparty risk — that’s the probability one party involved in a transaction or agreement might default on its contractual obligation because neither party has control of the agreement’s execution or enforcement. Lastly, they are more efficient due to automation. Operating on blockchains allows for cheaper and more frictionless transactions than traditional alternatives. For instance, the complexities of cross-border remittances involving multiple jurisdictions and sets of legal compliances can be simplified through coded automation in smart contracts.

Dr. Campbell Harvey, a J. Paul Sticht Professor of International Business at Fuqua, has done considerable research on smart contracts as well, culminating in the publication of a book, DeFi and the Future of Finance which was released in the fall of 2021.

In the book, Dr. Harvey explores the role smart contracts play in decentralized finance and how Ethereum and other smart contract platforms give rise to the ability for decentralized application or dApp. Additionally, smart contracts can only exist as long as the chain or platform they live on exists. However, because these platforms are decentralized, they remove the need for a third party to mediate the agreement. Harvey quickly realized how beneficial this could be in finance, specifically decentralized finance or DeFi where third-party companies, like banks, mediate agreements at a high price.

“Because it costs no more at an organization level to provide services to a customer with $100 or $100 million in assets, DeFi proponents believe that all meaningful financial infrastructure will be replaced by smart contracts which can provide more value to a larger group of users,” Harvey explains in the book

Beyond improving efficiency, this also creates greater accessibility to financial services. Smart contracts provide a foundation for DeFi by eliminating the middleman through publicly traceable coded agreements. However, the transition will not be completely seamless and Harvey also investigates the risks associated with smart contracts and advancements that need to be made for them to be fully scalable.

Ultimately, there is a smart contract connectivity problem. Essentially, smart contracts are unable to connect with external systems, data feeds, application programming interfaces (APIs), existing payment systems, or any other off-chain resource on their own. This is something called the Oracle Problem which Chainlink is looking to solve.

Harvey explains that when a smart contract is facilitating an exchange between two tokens, it determines the price by comparing exchange rates with another similar contract on the same chain. The other smart contract is therefore acting as a price oracle, meaning it is providing external price information. However, there are many opportunities to exploit this such as purchasing large amounts on one oracle exchange in order to alter the price and then go on to purchase even more on a different exchange in the opposite direction. This allows for capitalization on price movement by manipulating the information the oracle communicates to other smart contracts or exchanges.

That being said, smart contracts are being used heavily, and Pratt senior Manmit Singh has been developing them since his freshman year along with some of his peers in the Duke Blockchain Lab. One of his most exciting projects involved developing smart contracts for cryptocurrency-based energy trading on the Ethereum Virtual Machine allowing for a more seamless way to develop energy units.

One example of how this could be used outside of the crypto world is insurance. Currently, when people get into a car accident it takes months or even a year to evaluate the accident and release compensation. In the future, there could be sensors placed on cars connected to smart contracts that immediately evaluate the damage and payout.

Decentralization allows us to avoid using intermediaries and simply connect people to people or people to information as opposed to first connecting people to institutions that can then connect them to something else. This also allows for fault tolerance: if one blockchain goes down, the entire system does not go down with it. Additionally, because there is no central source controlling the system, it is very difficult to gain control of thus protecting against attack resistance and collusion resistance. While risks like the oracle problem need to be further explored, the world and importance of DeFi, as well as smart contracts, is only growing.

And as Ayesh put it, “This is the future.”

Post by Anna Gotskind, Class of 2022

Science Behind the Scenes: Get To Know a Zebrafish Lab Technician

By Shariar Vaez-Ghaemi

On December 6, 2021

In Animals, Medicine, Students

It’s 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, and Mark McDonough is making a very familiar journey through a very unfamiliar mode. With the light rain pelting down on his gelled hair, he’s walking the 2-mile trek from East Campus to West Campus. The C1 doesn’t run until 8:30 a.m. on weekends, and his job is simply too important to wait for Duke-provided transportation.

Since his third week as a freshman, Mark has held the position of Lab Technician at the Duke University School of Medicine Zebrafish Core Facilities. Through the job, which he earned via the university’s work-study program, Mark has had the opportunity to make his college experience more affordable while completing the behind-the-scenes work that keeps the university’s labs running.

Upon arriving at work every morning, Mark spends anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour cleaning the filters on the fish tanks, after which he removes feces and inserts food. These three tasks are just a microcosm of his duties as a lab technician, but without them, a majority of his assigned fish would die before their biological characteristics could be fully measured.

As a freshman, Mark McDonough (pictured) has had the opportunity to work in a lab that does cutting-edge research.

Mark’s day-to-day responsibilities are similar to those of many lab technicians. Hundreds of Duke’s affiliated research labs make use of living subjects and biological specimens which must be sheltered, fed, and closely monitored. Without the presence of lab technicians, studies involving these subjects could lead to inconsequential or misleading results.

Mark’s supervisor, Z-Core Facilities Manager Karina Olivieri, fully understands the importance of the three lab technicians in her five zebrafish facilities. Says Olivieri, technicians ensure the “health of the fish and quality of their water so that researchers can collect measurements and make valuable insights.” As the demand for zebrafish grows on Duke’s campus, she expects the number of lab technician roles to grow as well. This trend will likely not be unique to Duke.

The zebrafish’s see-through embryo, rapid life cycle, and well-documented genome make it a “model organism” for biological experiments.

Nationwide, demand for lab technicians has accelerated in many of the largest research corporations and academic institutions. According to the Foundation for Biomedical Research, almost every U.S. drug must pass through animal testing in order to reach FDA approval, meaning that larger amounts of living specimens must be preserved as the pharmaceutical industry grows. The rising presence of these experimental subjects may be why the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that lab technician roles are increasing at a rate of 11%, which beats the national average for STEM occupations.

Though lab technicians don’t present work at prestigious conferences or see their names printed at the top of cutting-edge research articles, their work is pivotal for ensuring that innovative research can be conducted at Duke and beyond. So in the unlikely event that you recognize a passing stranger as a lab technician, make sure to thank them for their service to the Duke community. They keep the university’s vibrant research scene – and its fish – thriving.

Post by Shariar Vaez-Ghaemi, class of 2025

What Happens When You Give People Money?

By Zella Hanson

On November 28, 2021

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Data, Policy, Responsible Conduct, Statistics, Students

What happens when you give people money? Dr. Aisha Nyandoro and Natalie Foster know: through their research, they’ve seen the impacts of guaranteed income firsthand.

On November 9, as part of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy’s Sulzberger Distinguished Lecture series, these experts discussed their work and what we can learn from it at “What Happens When You Give People Money: The Future of Economic Security for Children and Families.”

Foster, co-founder and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, began with the big idea of guaranteed income. Before the pandemic, wealth and income inequality were at all-time highs — disparities that “can be traced back to the origins of racialized capitalism.” But recently, things have gotten even harder. Wages have remained stagnant despite increases in productivity — and despite inflation, making it harder to afford things like rent. Foster denounced the “strong ideology that says that lack of security in this system is a personal failing. That if you can’t pull yourself up, there’s something wrong with you.” There’s something wrong with the system, Foster said. “People are working. The economy isn’t.”

Foster explained that the 1996 “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” fundamentally changed welfare by converting the old New Deal-era unlimited grant program into the flat-funded block grant we now know as TANF, leaving determination of eligibility to state discretion and generally “making welfare more punitive.” The Act, Foster said, was built on racist stereotypes, like that of the welfare queen. To make matters worse, it was passed against the backdrop of a persistent devaluation of the labor of people of color.

Foster said that even though there didn’t appear to be room in these political conditions to do things differently, she had the “audacity to imagine something else: the ‘adjacent possible.’” She wanted to give cash to people directly, ensuring an income floor regardless of whatever crises that may abound.

Foster worked with the mayor of Stockton, California on the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED), which provided 125 Stockton residents with $500 monthly payments for two years.

Foster was connected by a mutual friend to Nyandoro, the CEO of Springboard to Opportunities. Nyandoro had launched The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, which provides low-income Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi with $1,000 monthly payments for one year.

With The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, Nyandoro sought to shift away from economic policy “rooted in ‘what is,’ and toward ‘what could be.’” This concept has a rich history, she said, and includes the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers. She had a specific ‘what if’ in mind: “What if when Black women told us what they needed, we believed them?” What if we sought to overturn the very structures that keep these people down, and subverted the “paternalistic nature of the social safety net”?

Nyandoro stated that as a researcher, when she has questions, she “goes back to the people.” When she did, she found that although people’s needs were individual, “cash was ubiquitous” — cash was a solution that could address every single one of the problems that she heard. Giving cash directly could help combat a system that “penalizes people for being poor, rather than trying to lift them out of poverty.”

Why low-income Black mothers? Nyandoro explained that in order to do the work of economic liberation, one must identify what’s wrong with the system. In this case, that meant identifying those who are the most negatively impacted by the system, and using what limited resources are available to help them specifically.

Nyandoro turned to her findings: giving people cash works. These mothers are often working tirelessly, holding down two or three jobs and struggling to make ends meet. After receiving the money, people continue to work and often do so at higher rates (a major fear of opponents of guaranteed income). As a result, their income is often doubled — with life-changing results.

Beyond the numbers, Nyandoro emphasized that “we are seeing joy. We don’t talk about joy enough as it relates to Black women.” This money allowed Black women to feel free, to be entrepreneurial: to “dare to dream for the first time — for themselves and for their families.”

She referenced Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous speech “The Danger of a Single Story,” explaining that in order to change the narrative, “we need to change the narrator.” It’s time to think about whose voices we center.

In Jackson, Mississippi and Stockton, California, the pair had carried out research about the ‘adjacent possible.’ They’d used cities and states as “laboratories in democracy.” Foster said that their work was paving the way for gradual advances in guaranteed income — slowly, but surely. Then, the pandemic hit.

Suddenly, ideas that had recently been dismissed as too radical were viewed as necessary. Often unable to work, people needed money fast in order to put food on the table and cover their most urgent needs. The federal government rose to the challenge with the American Rescue Plan, providing stimulus checks and pandemic unemployment insurance, plus expanding the Child Tax Credit. “The ‘adjacent possible’”, Foster said, “had become the possible.”

The country saw an “immediate drop in poverty.” The pandemic was revealing, said Foster. It revealed that cash provides time, stress reduction, and resilience. It revealed that cash serves as a tool to create economic security and “build back better.” Above all, it revealed that “poverty is a policy choice that we’re currently making. We could make a different policy choice in order to eliminate it.”

The pandemic also revealed that stimulus checks and the Child Tax Credit were “very popular policies.” Nyandoro has observed support in the form of petitions for monthly cash transfers, the founding of organizations like Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and Guaranteed Income Community of Practice, and the launch of over a hundred guaranteed income pilots of some sort. All these efforts, Nyandoro said, are pushing toward “the same North Star”: centering the needs of families and achieving economic liberation through federal policy.

Foster turned the discussion toward next steps: “these victories have been immense, but could disappear” if the Build Back Better Act does not pass. The Act includes a year-long extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit, a key instantiation of guaranteed income. The Child Tax Credit has bipartisan support.

If the extension of the Child Tax Credit passes, then according to Foster, guaranteed income is one step closer to becoming a cornerstone of social policy. This would be a “nail in the coffin of the way we’ve done policy for the last fifty years — that you’re only worth what you do in the world. Every human has dignity and worth, and we have the opportunity to build a policy that says just that.”

Nyandoro agreed with Foster. As an anti-poverty advocate, she believes in a world without poverty: a world where “everyone can have a life of dignity for themselves and their families.” She believes that the ‘adjacent possible’ is achievable if “we can move beyond our own individual needs in order to view life as a collective, where prosperity is shared rather than hoarded.” She ended by quoting Toni Morrison: “if you have some power, then your job is to empower someone else.”

Last Friday, the House voted to pass the Build Back Better Act, which now heads to the Senate.