After 9/11, a Promise Made Good
MAGAZINE
Celebrating Emory as Place
Big Little Lives
FALL 2019
After watching his village burn, a South Sudanese child soldier decided to choose help over hurt. Now he’s a grad student who plans to apply his knowledge in his home country.
HE JUST KEPT WALKING
GOI ZUETA BUSI NE SS P R I NC I P L E # 8 :
IF YOU DON’T LIKE WHAT YOU SEE,
CHANGE WHERE YOU STAND. Leadership skills are often the missing link that keeps good professionals from being great. That’s why it’s embedded in every aspect of a Goizueta Business School degree. If you’re ready to take your next career step, explore Goizueta’s top-ranked graduate business programs.
TWO-YEAR MBA | ONE-YEAR MBA | EVENING MBA | MS IN BUSINESS ANALYTICS WEEKEND EXECUTIVE MBA | MODULAR EXECUTIVE MBA EMORY.BIZ/GBS
Emory Magazine VOL. 95 NO. 1
CONTENTS
16
24
Forward Thinker A former child soldier in Sudan, Garang Buk Buk Piol 20G 21MPH is a student in Emory’s Master’s of Development Practice program studying global development. He came a very long way to be here. By Paige P. Parvin 96G
Big Little Lives Emory’s Reproductive Center helps would-be parents create families, with expertise and personal attention. By Martha McKenzie
32 36
Party Like It’s 1919 It was a big year for Emory, filled with historic beginnings.
The Trees of Emory By Gary Hauk
38
A Promise Kept The first recipient of a special 9/11 scholarship starts his second year at Emory College. By Kimber Williams
CONTENTS
EMORY EVERYWHERE 43
40 UNDER FORTY
48
WALTER STERLING 94BBA
51
ALUMNI PROFILE
ALUMNI PROFILE
DAN RUBENSTEIN 94BBA
60
CODA
12
FLIGHT OF STORIES
Editor Paige P. Parvin 96G Vice President, Enterprise Communications Doug Busk Associate Vice President, Creative Services Dave Holston Assistant Vice President, Earned and Social Media Susan Chana
6
Art Director of Creative Services Peta Westmaas Design/Art Director Elizabeth Hautau Karp
POINTS OF INTEREST 4 A RT STUDENT-MADE MURAL 6
SCIENCE
LASKER AWARD
8 STUDENTS WELCOME, CLASS OF 2023 10
CONVERSATIONS WITH CLAIRE
HIV/AIDS EXPERT ANTHONY FAUCI
12 INNOVATION SLAVE VOYAGES 14 RESEARCH MECHANOTECHNOLOGY
43 MORE ONLINE AT EMORY.EDU/MAGAZINE EXPANDED COVERAGE EMORY FORTY UNDER 40
Check out the full bios online
VIDEO CONVERSATIONS WITH CLAIRE: ANTHONY FAUCI SPECIAL STORY THE DINNER TABLE
A conversation at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights on its fifth anniversary.
Contributors Carol Clark Leigh DeLozier Elizabeth Cobb Durel
Quinn Eastman Gary Hauk 91PhD April Hunt Rebecca Kleinman 93C Greg Forbes Siegman Martha McKenzie Kimber Williams Copy Editor Jane Howell Photography Kay Hinton Stephen Nowland Ann Watson Production Manager Stuart Turner Senior Vice President, Communications and Public Affairs David Sandor University President Claire E. Sterk
EMORY MAGAZINE (ISSN 00136727) is published quarterly by Emory’s Division of Communications and Public Affairs. Nonprofit postage paid at 3900 Crown Rd. SE, Atlanta, Georgia, 30304; and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Advancement and Alumni Engagement Office of Data Management, 1762 Clifton Road, Suite 1400, Atlanta, Georgia 30322. Emory Magazine is distributed free to alumni and friends of the university. Address changes may be emailed to eurec@emory. edu or sent to the Advancement and Alumni Engagement Office of Data Management, 1762 Clifton Road, Suite 1400, Atlanta, Georgia 30322. If you are an individual with a disability and wish to acquire this publication in an alternative format, please contact Emory Magazine (address above). No. 20-EU-EMAG-0050 ©2019, a publication of Communications and Public Affairs. The comments and opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of Emory University or the staff of Emory Magazine.
ON THE COVER PHOTO BY KAY HINTON, EMORY PHOTO/VIDEO; DESIGN CONCEPT BY ELIZABETH HAUTAU KARP; BACKDROP: GETTY IMAGES.
THE BIG PICTURE M O V E -I N D AY Emory College’s Class of 2023 arrived on campus
P H O T O G R A P H Y K AY H I N TO N
Saturday, August 24, greeted by helpful volunteers and hugs.
P OI N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > ART
“We Are Atlanta” T
he Vortex. The Varsity. Ludacris. skyline, music scene, historic figures, Waffle House. The 1996 Olympics. sports teams, tourist spots. As word of MLK Jr. The Lady of the Lake. the mural spread through social media More than a dozen student artists, and other arts-related organizations with majors from business to biology, on campus, so did the excitement. have created a vibrant tribute to Atlan“It’s been a dream of mine to paint ta at the center of Emory’s campus. a mural,” says Sierra Basquez 21B, a Claire Pomykala 21C, a junior majunior marketing and entrepreneurship joring in human health, was the driving major. “I loved the idea of sharing force behind the Cox bridge artwork: “I my work publicly and giving back to decided [the campus needed] a mural. the school.” A bright, loud, colorful mural.” “I saw someone advertising the She talked with Campus Life project on Instagram,” adds Mallika representatives David Clark, associate Kolachala 19C, who graduated in vice president, and May with a degree David Furhman, senior in human health. “I director of operations. attended the initial “We had been looking meetings and ended for ways to brighten up becoming one of up Cox Hall, and the the lead artists.” blank wall beside the Hayden Hadley outdoor dining area 21B, a junior studying seemed like the strategy and manperfect spot,” agement consulting, Furhman says. designed and painted Pomykala’s next the row of thirteen step was to determine colorful faces that the mural’s theme. proclaim, “We “The concept of Atare Atlanta.” lanta kept coming up “I felt that it was over and over again,” vital to exemplify the she says, which she incredible diversity found especially fitthat exists at Emory — DAVID FURHMAN, CAMPUS LIFE ting since the Emory and in Atlanta overcampus is now part all,” she says. “I sat of the city of Atlanta. “You see murals on the ground for many hours painting in neighborhoods all around Atlanta, those faces. Friends and a few strangwhether you’re at the Krog Street ers sat with me to help if they had time. Market, in Kirkwood or biking on the People would pass by and just thank us BeltLine. Why shouldn’t Emory be part for working on it, saying that the mural of that?” made them feel happy. It was amazing Pomykala pulled together a list of to meet appreciators and creators of ideas centered on Atlanta: the city’s art at Emory.”—Leigh DeLozier 4
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“WHEN WE SAW WHAT THEY WANTED TO DO, IT WAS A REAL ‘WOW’ MOMENT FOR US. WE LOVED HOW THE DESIGN REPRESENTED ATLANTA AND ITS DIVERSITY. THE STUDENTS ARE INCREDIBLY TALENTED AND WERE SO EXCITED ABOUT THE PROJECT.”
Rank and File Emory holds steady in key national rankings
E
mory has again been ranked
No. 21 among the nation’s top
universities in the new 2020 Best
Colleges guidebook from US News & World Report, released September 9.
Emory also was listed as
No. 21 among national universities offering the “best value” to
students based on a combination of academic quality and the average level of need-based financial aid. The university was cited for its economic diversity, with 19 percent of its undergraduates
receiving need-based Pell Grants, and was among schools with the
largest percentage of international undergraduates at 16 percent. Goizueta Business School,
which is ranked separately based on a survey of deans and senior faculty at peer institutions, was No. 15 in the undergraduate business rankings.
Emory has been cited as one of
the world’s top research universities (Leiden Ranking), among the best for quality of life and
classroom experience (Princeton
Review), and as a best value among private universities (Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Princeton Review, Forbes). FA L L 2 019
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P OI N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > SC I ENC E
“We are extremely fortunate to have him as a member of our Emory University and Vaccine Center faculty,” says Jonathan Lewin, Emory executive vice president for health affairs and executive director of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center. The adaptive immune system, which comprises B and T cells, “remembers” specific invader organisms (known as pathogens) or other abnormal cells in the body that it has encountered, and eliminates them. CELLULAR HERO Immunologist Max Cooper, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at B cells develop in the bone marrow Emory, is being honored with a Lasker Award, sometimes called America’s Nobel, for changing our and produce antibodies in response to understanding of the human immune system by identifying and defining the function of B cells and T cells. pathogens, disabling them or tagging them to be destroyed. T cells mature in the thymus gland and help alert B cells to the presence of pathogens; they can also detect and kill infected or abnormal cells. HOW IMMUNOLOGIST MAX COOPER Miller showed that the thymus, preMAY HAVE SAVED YOUR LIFE viously thought to be a vestigial organ, is essential for immune function. Cooper then demonstrated that there are two distinct cell lineages in half-century ago, Max Cooper made a historic discovery that forever the adaptive immune system: B cells changed our understanding of the human immune system. His breakand T cells. through—that the body has two separate kinds of lymphocytes, or white Working with chickens, he showed blood cells, to defend itself—opened the door to a new world of treatments that an avian organ called the bursa of and vaccines. Fabricius is the site where B cells maNow the Emory immunologist is being honored with a Lasker Award, ture, and he characterized the different America’s most prestigious biomedical research award, for his joint work on the stages of B cell development. discovery that has helped save countless lives. Miller established that interactions The Lasker Foundation announced on September 10 that Cooper is a recipient between B and T cells are essential to of the 2019 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. their normal maturation and functions. He is professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Emory University Later, Cooper and colleagues School of Medicine, a member of the Emory Vaccine Center, and a Georgia showed that, in mammals, B cells are Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He is honored along with Jacques Miller from generated in the liver of the fetus and in the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. the bone marrow after birth. Cooper and Miller are recognized for identifying and defining the function of These seminal discoveries defined B and T cells, a monumental achievement that uncovered the organizing principle of the adaptive immune system and launched the course of modern immunology. the field of adaptive immunity
Line of Defense
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PH O T O G R A PH Y K AY H I N TO N
A
SHORT LIST
HIS LANDMARK DISCOVERIES PROVIDED A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING HOW WHITE BLOOD CELLS COMBAT INFECTION.
and serve as the building blocks for current immunology research and clinical advances. “Max’s contributions to the field of immunology are enormous and transformative,” says Rafi Ahmed, director of the Emory Vaccine Center and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. “He continues to conduct groundbreaking research that is shaping current science and the future of medicine.” Cooper is a member of the Emory Center for AIDS Research and the Emory Winship Cancer Institute, professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and a former president of the American Association of Immunologists and of the Clinical Immunology Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 he was elected to the Académie des Sciences of the Institut de France and to the Royal Society of London. His landmark discoveries provided a framework for understanding how white blood cells normally combat infection—and how they can undergo abnormal development to cause immune deficiencies, leukemia, lymphomas, and autoimmune diseases. Cooper’s work also contributed to the medical knowledge that enabled transplants of bone marrow stem
cells to treat blood cell cancers. In 2018 he was awarded the Japan Prize, which recognizes individuals who are pioneers in their fields and whose original and outstanding achievements not only contribute to the advancement of science and technology, but also promote peace and prosperity for all mankind. “We are tremendously proud of Dr. Cooper and this outstanding and well-deserved recognition of his lifelong work,” says Vikas Sukhatme, dean of Emory School of Medicine. “His seminal discoveries have been essential to the advancement of the field of immunology and its life-changing results—basic science enabling clinical advances across a broad spectrum of diseases at the very highest level.” The Lasker Awards are America’s most prestigious biomedical research awards, and for the past seventy-four years have recognized the contributions of leaders who made major advances in the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, cure, or prevention of human diseases. Recipients of the Lasker Medical Research Awards are selected by a distinguished international jury. Previous Emory recipients include William H. Foege, Emeritus Presidential Distinguished Professor of International Health, and Mahlon DeLong, William Timmie Professor of Neurology.—Quinn Eastman
THIS IS BIG Emory is the largest employer in metro Atlanta, according to a new list published by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Emory, which had been second only to Delta Air Lines in the number of people it employs in the twenty-county Atlanta metro region, surpassed the airline in the size of its local workforce for the first time since the publication began the list in 1990. Emory has 31,214 full-time employees in the metro-Atlanta region as of December 2018. Altogether, Emory employs a full-time workforce of 37,716 and directly or indirectly supports nearly 77,400 jobs statewide.
TRIFECTA The Emory Office of Advancement and Alumni Engagement (AAE) recently named three new assistant vice presidents to provide leadership and strategic direction in fundraising, alumni, and constituent engagement efforts. Margaret Fala leads advancement and engagement for clinical and grateful patient programs and medical research. Marla Vickers directs advancement and engagement for Oxford College, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Goizueta Business School, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Campus Life and Athletics, Parent Philanthropy, Libraries, and Michael C. Carlos Museum. Anya Reid leads advancement and engagement for the Rollins School of Public Health, School of Law, Candler School of Theology, School of Medicine, James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies, Global Health Institute, and the Center for Ethics. Combined, they bring more than fifty years of development experience to AAE.
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P OI N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > ST UD E NT S
THEY’RE ALL IN Emory welcomes the Class of 2023
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Joining classmates from forty-eight US states, international students make up 18 percent of the first-year class at Emory College and 19.4 percent of the first-year class at Oxford College. At Emory College, 11 percent are first-generation college students; at Oxford College, 6.5 percent are first-generation. Currently 58 percent of Emory undergraduates receive financial aid. Packages include grants, loans, and work-study opportunities. Additionally, 21 percent of current first-year students are eligible for federal Pell grants.—April Hunt
PURPOSE DRIVEN
Emory College admitted 4,512 students, a 15 percent admission rate. Oxford College admitted 3,432 students, a 19 percent admission rate. Students are from forty-eight states and around the world. Myles Dunn (above), an Emory Scholar from Atlanta, says he plans to get involved in “as many things as possible.”
PH O T O G R A PH Y K AY H I N TO N
yles Dunn 23C was among the record pool of 30,372 applicants to Emory College for admission this past fall. When he learned he got in, his reaction—captured on video—was epic. “Oh. Oh. Oh,” he stammered, on a phone call to his mother. “I … I got into Emory …” while his friends cheered around him. Dunn joins the class of 4,512 first-year Emory College students as a Woodruff Scholar, a Gates Scholar, and a QuestBridge scholar. “Growing up in Atlanta, you know how amazing Emory is,” he says. “It was always on my radar.” Without financial support, Emory wouldn’t have been an option. “When I was seven, my mom and dad got a divorce—she had to raise my siblings and me by herself,” Dunn says. “I knew we received food stamps, but I didn’t know how much we struggled until I was older, because she hid it so well.” His mother worked for the Atlanta Public Schools system, first as an elementary school secretary, then a budget analyst, and now a school business manager. Education, she demonstrated, could change lives. Dunn attended high school at Carver Early College, where he was student government president, participated in the Esquires Inc. (a big brother/little brother program), was in multiple honors societies, played football, and performed in the band. “I plan to do the same thing at Emory, to get involved,” he says. “I don’t like to box myself in, I prefer to try as many things as possible.” Emory College offered admission to 4,512 students, a 15 percent admission rate. Oxford College admitted 3,432 students, a 19 percent admission rate. The median SAT score for students admitted to Emory College was 1500, meaning half of them were above a score considered in the 99th percentile nationally. The median unweighted high school GPA of admitted students was 3.92. “That represents a tremendous amount of talent,” says John Latting, associate vice provost for enrollment and Emory dean of admission. “It’s a very diverse group with a definite sense of purpose, which is characteristic of the students who are drawn to Emory. And they bring with them a stunning breadth of experiences and backgrounds.”
SHORT LIST
TOP NOTCH Emory Scholars Tom Garrett, of Burnsville, North Carolina, Grace Johnson, of Greenville, South Carolina, and Sachi Madan, of Bellevue, Washington, are excited about the interdisciplinary opportunities they will have at Emory, as well as the chance to do research and study abroad.
Making Their Way The newest Emory Scholars arrive, with ambition and enthusiasm
SCHOLAR PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE EMORY SCHOLARS PROGRAM
T
hey have served on local school boards, conducted climate-change research, built state-level political action committees, and led mental health campaigns, all while still in high school. The newest class of Emory Scholars—twenty-one recipients of the university’s top merit scholarships—combine academic achievement with a commitment to leadership and community service. The Emory Scholars Program has sought the most talented students with a demonstrated eagerness for real-world impact since 1981, the first year of the Robert W. Woodruff Scholarships. Woodruff, the former president of The Coca-Cola Company, made news with a $105 million gift to Emory in 1979, part of which was used to create his signature scholarship, designed to draw Ivy League–bound students to Emory instead. “We’re excited to welcome such a vibrant, diverse, and promising group of students to Emory,” says Edmund Goode, assistant director of the Emory Scholars Program. “We’re ready to empower them to make meaningful contributions to our campus, the city of Atlanta, and beyond.” This year, Emory College, on the Atlanta campus, welcomed fourteen Woodruff Scholars, while five Woodruff Scholars will spend their first two years on Emory’s original campus in Oxford, Georgia. The Atlanta campus also has two Jenkins Scholars, named for the founder of the Publix grocery store chain. While Emory Scholars hail from around the world, they say they were drawn to Emory by the university’s interdisciplinary strengths. Jenkins Scholar Tom Garrett 23C is weighing
majors in psychology, neuroscience and behavioral biology, and history. “Emory is ideal for overlapping interests, and it’s just such a welcoming place. I’m not worried about finding something I love.” Grace Johnson 23C, an Oxford Woodruff Scholar from Greenville, South Carolina, is considering a Spanish major and will run cross country. “I know I’ll thrive in the more connected Oxford environment and can expand my impact from there,” she says. Sachi Madan 23C lived abroad before her family settled in Bellevue, Washington. She plans a double major in politics and international studies. “The opportunities are so unique at Emory, like encouraging study abroad as part of research,” Madan says. “You can really make your own way here.”—April Hunt
GAINFULLY EMPLOYED Emory has been recognized as one of “America’s Best Employers for Women,” according to a new ranking by Forbes magazine. Emory was No. 41 among three hundred American companies, schools, and organizations included in the magazine’s second annual ranking, and No. 4 among Georgia-based companies. Earlier this year, Emory was named by Forbes as one of America’s Best Employers (No. 87), one of the Best Employers for Diversity (Emory University No. 31, Emory Healthcare No. 109), and among the Best Employers in Georgia (Emory University No. 2, Emory Healthcare No. 8).
HIGH FLYING The Research Corporation for Science Advancement has named Emory’s Gordon Berman, assistant professor of biology, as one of the twenty-four recipients of the 2019 Cottrell Scholar Awards, which recognize early-career teacher-scholars for outstanding contributions to science and citizenship. Berman will receive $100,000 toward a three-year project integrating his teaching and research, which focuses on the intersection of theoretical biophysics and computational neuroscience, specifically information bottlenecks and the neural control of behavior in fruit flies.
NEW CHAPLAIN Following a national search, Emory has selected the Rev. Gregory W. McGonigle as university chaplain and dean of spiritual and religious life. McGonigle previously served as university chaplain at Tufts University and is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister with a strong background in world religions, ecumenism, and religion in the contemporary world.
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spen was the scenic backdrop for this installment of “Conversations with Claire,” which pairs Emory President Claire E. Sterk with significant figures to offer insights on topics of the day. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a principal architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, spoke with Sterk at the 2019 Aspen Ideas: Health conference, after they served together on a panel that tackled the question: Is it possible to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the US in five years? CES: Would you talk a little about the
the level of virus to below detectible
and the next steps?
someone in their twenties with HIV,
progress we have made [against HIV]
AF: When I first started taking care of patients—and we saw them only
after they had advanced disease—the median survival was about twelve
months. Once the cause was proven in 1984, we started doing general testing since we had a diagnostic
test. That was stunning. We realized there were infinitely more people
infected than what we were seeing. The next thing that happened, we
started developing drugs. So from
and kept it there. Today, if you treat
you could get them an additional fifty
years to live, almost a normal lifespan.
whammy of stigma in those areas. You are talking about individuals, mostly African American men who have
sex with men who live in the South.
We’ve got to engage the faith-based
community, community organizations
and workers, to make it easy for those individuals to get into programs for prevention and treatment. That’s a
different challenge than in San Francisco, NYC, D.C.
area, what advice would you give them?
decrease by 97 percent the chance
and said, I want to do research in this
that you will acquire infection.
AF: For pure innovation, I would steer
all of these things to their fullest,
and either a cure or a way that pa-
Theoretically, if we implemented
we could end the epidemic in the US and globally. But we live in the real world.
lifetime, of ending HIV.
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is overcoming the double and triple
you take a single pill a day, you can
the triple combination that dropped EMORY MAGAZINE
in specific counties. The challenge
CES: If a young scientist came to you
is, which means if you’re at risk and
CES: I am really curious to hear your
10
the new infections are in rural areas
And we have preexposure prophylax-
1987, when AZT was identified as the
first drug, to 1996 when we developed
AF: We have discovered that many of
perspective on the ambition, during our
them toward developing a vaccine
tients don’t have to take a pill every
single day. For public health impact,
there is so much to be done in how we can implement the tools that we have. CES: Do you think we’ll get to the point
in our lifetime where we have a vaccine?
SHORT LIST
Latinx Studies AF: I do, but it’s unlikely to be a vaccine that is like a polio
or measles vaccine that is 95
percent to 97 percent effective. Given the special nature of HIV,
and that the body doesn’t make a very good immune response against it, I’m cautiously op-
timistic, but 50 to 55 percent immunity would be a good advance.
CES: What would you like to add that I haven’t asked?
AF: HIV used to get a lot of
attention. Now when I testify
before Congress, I hardly get
asked about HIV. That’s because they feel that we’ve done very
well, so let’s move on to another problem. That’s dangerous
because when you think you’ve
solved the problem and you ha-
ven’t completely solved it, that’s when it can get out of hand.
SEE THE FULL CONVERSATION AND MORE AT EMORY.EDU/MAGAZINE
THREE EMINENT SCHOLARS IN LATINX STUDIES ARE JOINING EMORY COLLEGE’S FACULTY
R
ocío Zambrana, acting associate professor of philosophy, began at Emory this fall with an upper-level undergraduate class on Latin American and Caribbean feminism, which focuses on the intersections of thought that examine race, power, gender, and class. Bernard Fraga, an acting associate professor of political science and well-known public scholar on American elections and racial/ethnic politics, and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, an acting professor of English and founding chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, arrive next June. All three scholars will join Emory as senior faculty members. As leaders in their respective disciplines, Zambrana, Fraga, and Guidotti-Hernández bring a commitment to scholarly inquiry and new courses on Latinx communities, cultures, experiences, and identities, as well as essential mentorship for graduate and undergraduate students. “This is an outstanding cohort of leaders in the growing interdisciplinary field of Latinx studies, and we eagerly anticipate their contributions and collaborations within their disciplines and across the humanities and social sciences,” says Carla Freeman, senior associate dean for faculty in Emory College, who led the recruitment and hiring process.
HELPING THE SICKEST Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta have been selected to participate as a new research site for the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN), the first such federally funded network in the country, which began in 2001. They join Brown University/Hasbro Children’s Hospital and the University of California San Francisco/Benioff Children’s Hospital (Oakland). They have been awarded a four-year, $2.8 million grant to develop and conduct studies that focus on preventing and reducing morbidity and mortality in the sickest of ill and injured children.
FIRST-TIMER Jacob Kasel 18C will study for two years in France as the first Emory University winner of the Michel David-Weill Scholarship. The scholarship selects a single student each year from applicants from thirty top US institutions. Valued at $80,000, it fully funds the two-year master’s degree program at the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Studies or “Sciences Po.” Kasel graduated with highest honors with a double major in Spanish and Portuguese and comparative literature from Emory College in December 2018.
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P OI N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > I NNOVAT I ON
Courses Charted A MASSIVE DIGITAL RESOURCE UNCOVERS CHAPTERS IN HUMAN HISTORY
F
or African American families seeking clues to their ancestry, the road frequently ends with the scant
record-keeping that surrounds the American slave
trade—people kept as property with names lost to history.
So when Henry Louis Gates Jr. works with guests on the
acclaimed PBS program Finding Your Roots whose family stories have been obscured by slavery, he routinely looks
for clues in Emory’s Slave Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database.
“It’s a gold mine,” says Gates, director of the Hutchins
Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University—an early supporter of the Slave Voyages project—who calls it “one of the most dramatically significant
research projects in the history of African studies, African American studies, and the history of world slavery itself.”
Ten years ago, when Emory created a website dedicated
to data that provided a broader, more complete portrait of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, there
was nothing quite like it in the world. Today the updated and expanded
most used resources in the digital
humanities. The newly redesigned
The trans-Atlantic slave
site can attract more than one
trade marked the largest
educators, scholars, scientists,
long-distance coerced
thousand visitors a day, including
CONNECTOR Historian David Eltis has overseen the database’s transition from punch cards to CD-ROM to interactive website.
They ended up anywhere from Boston to Buenos
Aires, even Pacific ports or hundreds of miles inland,
artists, genealogists, and curators
movement of people in
especially in Brazil.
centers.
history and, prior to the
of the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Founda-
with national museums and history But cataloging data covering
more than three centuries of voyag-
mid-nineteenth century,
es from Africa to the New World—
formed the major demo-
human history—captured only part
graphic wellspring for
among the largest slave routes in
of the picture. Once across the At-
the repeopling of the
Africans were then dispatched on
Americas.
destinations within the Americas.
—David Eltis
lantic, up to 20 percent of enslaved yet another voyage to their final
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Now, with support from the National Endowment
tion, and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Board, a team of international scholars—
many with Emory roots—has partnered with Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship to update and expand slavevoyages.org.
The redesign incorporates a trove of new data
on the lesser-explored intra-American slave trade,
effectively redrawing the map of slavery throughout the Americas and opening staggering new vistas of research.
P H O T O G R A P H Y A N N WAT S O N
database has become one of the
SHORT LIST
SHE’S SWITZERLAND Lynell Cadray has been appointed Emory’s inaugural university ombudsperson and senior adviser to the president, a role that will provide the campus community with a new resource for informal conflict resolution. Cadray will serve as an impartial, neutral, and confidential third party available to work with Emory faculty, staff, and administrators—and students, when appropriate—to resolve university-related conflict through consulting, negotiation, and mediation.
DOCUMENTING THE PAST (from top left, clockwise) Job Ben Solomon, a Fulbe Muslim sent on a slave vessel from Gambia to a tobacco farm in Maryland; the register from the brigantine Virtude, kept as a formal record of emancipation to help protect people from re-enslavement; an engraving of canoes carrying slaves aboard ships on the Gold Coast, the former British Colony in West Africa; a depiction of thousands of slave voyages across the Atlantic (view in a timelapse video on SlaveVoyages.org).
“The trans-Atlantic slave trade marked thousand slave trading voyages between
the largest long-distance coerced move-
Africa and the New World, another 11,400
mid-nineteenth century, formed the major
of the Americas to another, and data on
ment of people in history and, prior to the
intra-American voyages from one part
demographic wellspring for the repeopling some ninety-two thousand Africans forced of the Americas,” says Emory historian
to make those journeys.
Emeritus of History and codirector of the
that reveals patterns and connections
David Eltis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor Slave Voyages project.
The Slave Voyages site now provides
resources detailing more than thirty-six
The result is consolidated information
once obscured by barriers of language and geography.—Kimber Williams
KICKOFF TIME Emory Healthcare and the Atlanta Falcons broke ground on a new musculoskeletal and sports medicine clinic, located at the IBM Performance Fields, home of the Atlanta Falcons. The clinic will provide a new location for patients, while also being an access point for Falcons who may need diagnostic imaging or to be seen by a sports medicine expert. In 2018, Emory Healthcare became the official team health care provider, adding on to their existing role as the medical provider of the Atlanta Falcons.
TEACHING AMERICA Emory is ranked No.1 nationally among medium-sized universities for graduates going to Teach for America, with twenty-eight graduates joining the teaching corps this year. The organization recruits outstanding graduates to commit to teach in high-need public schools for at least two years. The more than 3,110 individuals joining Teach for America this year will impact fifty-one regions across thirty-six states and D.C.
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P OI N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > RESE ARC H
Teeny Tiny Tic-Tac-Toe, Anyone? Emory scientists help usher in a new era of tiny things made from DNA
can be combined with natural DNA strands from bacteriophages. By moving around the sequence of letters on the strands, researchers can get the DNA strands to bind together in ways that create different shapes. The stiffness of DNA strands can also easily be adjusted, so they remain straight as a piece of dry spaghetti or bend and coil like boiled spaghetti. EMERGING FIELD DNA “mechanotechnology” expands the opportunities for research involving biomedicine and materials science, says Professor of Chemistry Khalid Salaita. “It’s like discovering The ability to make these precise, three-dia new continent and opening up fresh territory to explore.” Salaita (above right, center) and Aaron mensional structures began as a novelty, Blanchard (above right, left) are helping pioneer the field. nicknamed “DNA origami,” resulting in objects such as a microscopic map of the world and sense mechanical forces at the ust as the steam engine set and, more recently, the tiniest-ever game of nanoscale. “For a long time,” Salaita the stage for the Industrial tic-tac-toe, played on a DNA board. says, “scientists have been good at Revolution, and micro-transisWork on novelty objects continues to tors sparked the digital age, nanoscale making micro devices, hundreds of provide new insights into the mechanical times smaller than the width of a devices made from DNA are opening properties of DNA. These insights are driving human hair. It’s been more challeng- the ability to make DNA machines that up a new era in biomedical research ing to make functional nano devices, generate, transmit, and sense mechanical and materials science. thousands of times smaller than that. forces. “If you put together these three main The journal Science describes the But using DNA as the component emerging uses of DNA mechanical components of mechanical devices, you begin parts is making it possible to build devices in a “Perspective” article by to get hammers and cogs and wheels and Khalid Salaita, professor of chemistry, extremely elaborate nano devices you can start building nano machines,” because the DNA parts self-assemble.” Salaita says. and Aaron Blanchard, a graduate DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, student in the Coulter Department Potential uses for such devices include stores and transmits genetic inforof Biomedical Engineering, a joint drug delivery devices in the form of nanomation as a code made up of four program of Georgia Institute of capsules that open up when they reach a chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine target site, nano-computers, and nano-robots Technology and Emory. (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). The working on nanoscale assembly lines. The The article heralds a new field, which Blanchard dubbed “DNA mech- DNA bases have a natural affinity to Salaita Lab is one of about one hundred pair up with each other—A with T and around the world working at the forefront of anotechnology,” to engineer DNA C with G. Synthetic strands of DNA machines that generate, transmit, DNA mechanotechnology. —Carol Clark
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PHOTOGRAPHY EMORY PHOTO / VIDEO
J
SHORT LIST
To Peace and Peanut Butter IN HIS ANNUAL TOWN HALL, CARTER ENCOURAGED PUBLIC SERVICE AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
I
n mid-September, days before his ninety-fifth birthday, former US
President Jimmy Carter joined nearly
two thousand Emory students for the
thirty-eighth annual Carter Town Hall—a
spirited, surprisingly candid exchange that
PEACE BUILDER Former President Jimmy Carter called for the US to become a superpower in protecting peace, human rights, and the environment.
When asked what motivates the Nobel
offers firsthand lessons in life, leadership,
Peace Prize–winner and tenured University
public service.
and global communities, Carter smiled
and governance gleaned from a lifetime of Carter’s unifying message—a call for
GRADUATE MAKES GOOD School of Nursing Assistant Clinical Professor Sydney Spangler was named a Distinguished Alumna by her alma mater, the University of Utah College of Nursing. She received a BSN and MSN from the School of Nursing at University of Utah. Spangler’s overarching research interest involves women’s access to reproductive health care in low-income contexts— particularly the influence of social and material inequalities in accessing reproductive health services.
Distinguished Professor to help both local
wryly, saying, “I generally try to do what my
peace-building, public service, and political wife tells me to do.” engagement—bridged generations.
“The basic change that needs to be
made in our government is for us to be-
The best advice he ever received came
from a high school superintendent: “We
must accommodate changing times, but
come a superpower, I’d say, in four different cling to principles that never change.” The categories of life,” he said, advocating for
worst was when he was urged to respond
on earth for promoting peace, champion-
he refused to do, out of concern that it
policies that address climate change, and
es and Iranian citizens.
United States.”
straight to his Georgia heritage: “As a
in all levels of the political process. “The
almond butter?”
the US to become known as the top nation to the Iran hostage crisis with bombs, which ing human rights, advancing environmental would lead to the deaths of the US hostag“welcoming everybody as equals to the
He encouraged women to get involved
P H O T O G R A P H Y K AY H I N TO N
more women we have in elected office,
the better off our country will be, the more
His final question of the evening went
peanut farmer, what are your thoughts on “I never have tasted it, and I don’t intend
to,” he deadpanned. “We only have peanut
peaceful we will be, and the more success- butter in our house.” ful the United States will be in every way,”
For Carolina Gustafson, a PhD student
he said.
from West Hartford, Connecticut, studying
If you don’t get elected the first time, run
Carter answer a question she had submit-
“So, women, run for office. Get elected.
again,” he added, noting that’s what he had to do.
nursing in Laney Graduate School, hearing
RESIDENCY GRANTED School of Nursing associate clinical professor Clint Shedd has received a four-year, $2.2 million grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to fund a nurse practitioner residency program. The program centers on the special challenges faced by primary care nurse practitioners (PCNP) in Federally Qualified Health Centers, including caring for patients with complex medical and social needs who present late in the disease process. The School of Nursing will partner with MedLink Georgia, which serves twenty-one counties in rural northeast Georgia, to create a twelve-month PCNP residency that other academic-practice partnerships could emulate.
ted was “probably the best moment of my year.” —Kimber Williams
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FORWARD>> THINKERS A n E m o r y m a s t e r ’s p r o g ra m is making global development effective, accountable, and real
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BY PAIGE P. PARVIN 96G PHOTOGRAPHY KAY HINTON
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arang Buk Buk Piol 20G 21 MPH doesn’t know his birthday. His passport and other legal documents say it was January 1, 1979. That’s almost certainly not accurate, but he comes from a place where a lot of things are more important than birth dates. Buk Buk was born near Aweil, a city in what is now South Sudan, sometime during 1979 or 1980. In 1983, a scant decade after the First Sudanese Civil War ended on rickety terms after seventeen years of conflict and violence, the second civil war broke out. It would last more than two decades, claim two million lives, and displace four million more. Whatever the actual date of his birth, that’s the world
that Buk Buk was born into. When he was a small child, uniformed militants came to his village and separated the men from the women and children. He remembers seeing many of the men burned to death, along with much of the village itself. That day, you could say that Buk Buk was reborn. Determination bloomed inside him. “I did not want to see my village burn again,” he says. Over time, he was to become a child soldier, a diligent student, a dedicated public health worker, a husband and father, and a respected community leader. He is now a graduate student in the Master’s of Development Practice (MDP) program in Emory’s Laney
Graduate School, studying global development so that he can return to foster social and economic progress in his home country. He has come a very long way to be here. GOOD INTENTIONS Emory’s MDP program was established ten years ago, with an initial grant from
“If you want people to know how to do something, you need to have them do it and not just talk about doing it.” —DAVID NUGENT
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to address a problem that up until then, no one really wanted to talk about: Sometimes the road to nowhere can be paved with good intentions. Leaders of the MacArthur Foundation had brought together a group of twenty global development leaders—including Jeffrey Koplan, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now Emory’s vice president
for global health—to ask the hard questions. Why wasn’t global development working? Many competent, well-meaning organizations were certainly doing a lot of good in the world’s poorest places, but shouldn’t the collective impact be greater? The group conducted an extensive study and produced a weighty report that yielded two key findings. One, global development experts tend to specialize—in public health, economics, politics, and so forth—with almost no integration among their areas of practice, so opportunities to collaborate and share resources for better results were being missed. And two, most educational programs did not require field experience as part of training future development leaders. “There was a recognition that field training should be central,” says David Nugent, professor of anthropology and founding director of the Emory MDP program. “If you want people to know how to do something, you need to have them do it and not just talk about doing it.” In response to the report, the MacArthur Foundation decided to fund a new wave of global development
SAGE ADVICE MDP program director David Nugent says one of the key areas of emphasis is monitoring and evaluation, now a specialty discipline that was long overlooked in the field of global development. “We want to build things, not tear them down,” he says. “Development has had a tendency to think whatever is there to begin with is not relevant, and we need to come in and be the experts.”
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PH O T O G R A PH Y K AY H I N TO N
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education that focuses on the integration of applicable academic disciplines as well as field experience. In 2008, 144 universities applied for funding and Emory’s became one of the first nine MDP programs in the world—and one of only two in the US, along with Columbia University. There are now some thirty worldwide. “Our students do interdisciplinary work on real-world problems,” Nugent says. “They take courses all across the university in addition to the seminars we have developed ourselves for the program. And to honor the spirit of that report, we send all our students into the field—twice.” A decade after its founding, the Emory MDP program is known for pushing students to take a respectful, realistic approach to global development and to learn from the world rather than trying to teach it. “Theories are fine,” Nugent says, “but if they have no relationship to what happens on the ground, the theories need to change.”
Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), in which he served as a solider for five years. That’s when a pattern began to emerge, one that has followed Buk Buk all the way to Emory. In the midst of unrest, violence, and hopelessness, people sensed a spark of promise in this bright, gentle, determined young man. He was chosen
“I realized right away that he was different from others I had worked with. . . . He had this welcoming demeanor. He was very eloquent and driven.” —DAVID STOBBELAAR
Buk Buk says. “He knew the reason why he was fighting. This is the person who changed my perception, who started telling me how important I would be if I’m educated. Every day we were together, if we went into any combat, he would tell me that if I go to school I will survive.” With the officer’s help, Buk Buk attended secondary school in South Sudan. Not long after, he was working as an apprentice to a local electrician when he encountered The Carter Center’s Guinea Worm eradication program. Seeing a chance to make a difference in area communities, he joined the
program as a volunteer, then became a field officer. The Emory-affiliated Carter Center has been leading the global fight against Guinea worm disease—a neglected tropical disease caused by an ancient parasite, contracted through larvae that lurk in water sources—for more than two decades. Thanks to efforts by the center and a range of public health partners, including the governments of endemic countries, incidence has been reduced from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to twenty-eight known cases in 2018. When the disease is officially eradicated, it will be the second human
FIELD EXPERIENCE Buk Buk (clockwise from below) with Carter Center colleague and friend David Stobbelaar; showing a Guinea worm extracted from a patient; and with colleagues at the Task Force for Global Health.
by an army officer to be his bodyguard and, in many ways, his protégé. That recognition was Buk Buk’s first glimpse of a better future. “He had good intentions,”
WHEN SPARKS FLY After the attack on his village, like thousands of South Sudanese youth who were torn from home and family, Buk Buk set off on a brutal journey, eventually making his way to Ethiopia on foot. Later, at about age eleven, he was conscripted into the FA L L 2 019
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SUPPORT CREW After talking with them for months via Skype, Buk Buk finally got to meet his group of supporters from teacher Kimberly Dickstein’s (far right, front row) high school class on the Emory campus last fall.
disease in history, following smallpox, and the first to be eradicated through education and behavior change rather than a vaccine. The partnership between Emory and The Carter Center has led a steady stream of students and alumni to the Guinea Worm eradication program, including the current director, Adam Weiss 15MPH; the South Sudan country representative, Jake Wheeler 08C; and Emily Staub 97OX 99C, associate director of communications and media relations for The Carter Center, who has worked to build visibility for the program since 2000. “Each of these cases is a human being with a family and a life,” says Weiss, who was appointed director in 2018 after nearly fifteen years 20
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working in four endemic countries. “These aren’t just numbers, these are people. This is why tens of thousands of volunteers, technical advisers, and staff are working in thousands of villages to find and contain the last cases of this miserable disease.” South Sudan is one of just five countries left on the radar and the forward momentum is strong, with remarkable progress made in recent years. But continuous conflict in the region has made field work difficult and dangerous. Carter Center and local staff are especially valued for their knowledge and ability to navigate affected areas. David Stobbelaar was serving as a technical adviser for the South Sudan Guinea FA L L 2 019
Worm program when he met Buk Buk in 2008. Stobbelaar had worked with many “lost boys”—former South Sudanese child soldiers—and found that because of their experiences they often struggled with mental illness such as PTSD, substance abuse, and a lack of motivation. “I realized right away that Buk Buk was different from others I had worked with,” says Stobbelaar, who now lives in Malawi. “He had this welcoming demeanor. He was very eloquent and driven. He was really good at following up and analyzing data, and he was able to provide a quick outline of what was going on in communities and come up with strategies.” During Buk Buk’s six years with the Guinea Worm program, he saved his earnings for a university education and eventually completed a bachelor’s degree at an institution in Nairobi. When he returned to Juba, Buk Buk worked with some community-based organizations, but opportunities for viable, long-term employment were scarce. He married and started a family, but believed he’d have a better shot at a career with a master’s degree. So he sought help from Stobbelaar, who had a few recommendations—including Emory’s MDP program, one of several to which he
formally applied. Stobbelaar also connected Buk Buk with a close friend, Kimberly Dickstein, a tenth-grade English teacher at Haddonfield Memorial High School in New Jersey. Dickstein had assigned her students the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, and thought interacting with a former child soldier in real time would bring those lessons to life. That’s how Buk Buk started appearing in her classroom via Skype, sharing his story and making far-flung friends who would—again—reroute his future. Buk Buk was elated when he was accepted to Emory’s MDP program, but his excitement quickly faded as reality set in. He was offered partial scholarships for tuition, but to get a US visa he had to show that he could support himself financially during his time in Atlanta. Despite his efforts to earn and save money, that was not going to happen. Then Dickstein’s sophomore English class learned that Buk Buk would have to pass up the opportunity to attend Emory’s MDP program. Marshalled by Dickstein, the band of teenagers organized a crowdfunding effort they called “Bring Garang to Emory” and worked for months to drum up the backing he needed. With the help of Stobbelaar and his wife,
Dickstein and her husband, staff from The Carter Center and Emory, and many others, they raised some $58,000— enough to secure Buk Buk a student visa. Buk Buk is a quiet person. He has a ready smile, but if you ask him about his years as a soldier, a shadow erases his face like a curtain falling. Last September, Dickstein brought the “Garang Five” to the Emory campus to meet Buk Buk in person for the first time. Waiting in a top-floor conference room, the high school students were abuzz with field-trip excitement and a catered lunch—until Buk Buk walked in and immediately became tearyeyed with emotion. It took all of five seconds for the entire room to follow suit. “Thank you so much,” Buk Buk told them. “I have been in a society where you say everything is fine even when it is not fine. When I learned I was accepted to Emory, I knew it could not happen. I said it was fine. This, being here, touches me. I don’t have words to explain the innermost of me.” The younger students seemed hungry for face time with the person they had met on a screen. They asked him a number of questions, including about how life in Atlanta is different from his home in South Sudan. “Well . . . people here walk dogs on ropes?” he replied.
IN THE FIELD MDP students share photos of their field experiences (top left, clockwise) A Kalomo District Administrative Officer thanks a group of women who have spoken about their successes and challenges; MDP student Melania Croce learns Nepali in Kathmandu; a women’s focus group in Cox’s Bazaar, host community of the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh; MDP student Ian Hamilton takes a break with elephants in Mole National Park, Ghana; MDP student Katie Pons (center) with a group of Hindu women in Jashore, Bangladesh, discussing livestock and nutrition.
“And restaurant menus have so much, how do you choose? For us, you eat only one thing every day. And it is not dusty! Where I am from, all the time you come home and your clothes are dirty because of the dust.” With a wide smile, Buk Buk added, “I don’t know how you guys would fit in if you come.” A MOVING LANDSCAPE Each summer, Emory’s MDP program scatters some thirty to forty graduate
students around the globe to field projects. One of the distinctions of the Emory program is that it requires two stints in the field during two consecutive summers. The first is to learn and develop recommendations; the second is to experiment with actual application of knowledge and skills. “The point is to do development better,” Nugent says. “We see this as a process in which the field dictates what matters.”
the program and coordinator of the field projects, most summers find MDP students working in about twenty countries and in partnership with fifteen to twenty organizations.
According to Carla Roncoli, associate director of
“Students’ interests range from global health to human
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The program coaches students to think of themselves as “embedded practitioners”—fully immersed in the communities where they live but also applying critical skills to address challenges and improve day-to-day lives.
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MDP’S REACH AROUND THE GLOBE rights to social enterprise to sustainability,” Roncoli says. “It’s a bit of a moving landscape. Sometimes an organization will hear about us and request a placement, and sometimes a student will come to us with a particular interest or topic, like empowering women through sports. The defining feature of the program is the close connection between theory and practice, between the classroom and the field.” About 10 to 20 percent of MDP students are non-US citizens, and many, like Buk Buk, plan to use their skills in their home countries after completion. Leslie Abimbola 20G spent the past summer working with Emory’s Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) program on the Stakeholder Mapping and Analysis Project with the Kenya site. After graduation, she plans to work in public health in her home country of Nigeria. “The main objective of my summer project was to identify key stakeholders working on child survival within the Kenya project areas,” Leslie says. “It was exciting to interact with these organizations, hear them talk about what they do, how they go about their work, the populations they serve, their collaborations, 22
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Carla Roncoli, coordinator of field projects, says MDP students work in about twenty countries and partner with dozens of organizations: “The defining feature of the program is the close connection between theory and practice, between the classroom and the field.” 1. BALANCING THE GENDER EQUATION (ABI DJAN)
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2. B OOSTING ECOTOURISM
6
( F UJI)
3. CLEARING THE AIR THROUGH POLLUTION PROGRAMS (CHINA, ZAM BI A)
4. CLEANER WATER AND SANITATION (COLU M BI A,
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I NDI A)
5. D ISASTER PREPAREDNESS (CA RIB BE AN, LATI N AM E RI CA)
6. F ENDING OFF DISEASE
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( HA ITI, DOM I NI CAN RE PU BLI C)
7. H EALTHIER MOTHERS, CHILDREN AND BABIES (CHIL E, E THI OPI A, KYRGYZSTAN)
8. H ELPING WOMEN WORK ( KENYA)
9. S USTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL PRACTICES (GUATEMALA,
7
KAJIADO, KENYA, NAIROBI, US)
10. S PORTING CHANCES (KE NYA)
and their challenges. The MDP program provides the ability to translate this knowledge to action, and this helps to make me a better practitioner.” The Emory MDP program now has about 120 alumni active around the world. Nafisa Ferdous 13G, who was born in Bangladesh but grew up in New York, most recently worked as the Asia/Pacific program officer for the global women’s and trans funding network Prospera. FA L L 2 019
“I really appreciate the flexibility that was afforded to me at MDP,” she says. “I had a fairly clear picture of what I wanted to focus on— work at the intersection of gender and environmental justice in Asia. I was taking courses in the public health school’s gender studies department. I crafted a semester-long independent study on transnational farmers’ movements. I studied Bangla in preparation for a field placement in Bangladesh. I worked with
several community farms in Atlanta that addressed racial and economic justice issues. I did a lot in my two years at MDP.” STEP BY STEP While his classmates ventured to some of the world’s remote corners, Buk Buk spent his first summer as an Emory graduate student in nearby Decatur, working as an intern with the university-affiliated Task Force for Global Health. That’s partly because his
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visa status won’t allow him to leave the US—even to visit his wife, Awau, and three children in South Sudan, including a new baby boy born after he came to Emory. He worked with David Addiss, adjunct professor in Emory’s Department of Global Health and a senior scientist at the task force, on a study of moral injury, especially how it affects veterans of war. Moral injury is a relatively recent term for the mental and emotional damage that
can result when required actions, such as military combat, directly conflict with one’s values and beliefs. The irony—or appropriateness—of the assignment is hardly lost on a former child soldier. “It’s a difficult feeling,” Buk Buk says. “If you have ever experienced moral injury, you will really feel guilt. I was very young, I did not have a lot of choices, but anything you do can stay with you. I look at perspective. How do I build the capacity
managed to meet his wife for a few brief moments on a strip of airplane tarmac between domestic flights. She also held his new baby. Staub marvels at the network that knits together communities in the world’s youngest country—and also at how everyone, it seems, knows Buk Buk. “Garang is an inspiration to his fellow Guinea worm contacts still working in South Sudan,” she says. “He 2 talks to folks often, giving guidance, counsel. I met numerous people while I was there who were motivated that Garang got educated and got out, but is coming back.” Buk Buk has now been named a Foege Fellow by the Rollins School of Public Health. The prestigious honor and accompanying funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation mean that he can extend his graduate education and be of communities that are part of the Emory commumorally distressed? When nity—but also, a world away I go back to South Sudan, from his home and family— those are the people I will be for an additional year. dealing with. Those who have His master’s degrees in seen their own people dying, both development practice taken lives, they are trauand global health will signifimatized because they know cantly increase his chances what they have done is not for a meaningful career in right. I need to understand South Sudan. my own experience so that I Garang Buk Buk Piol may can help others.” not know his actual birthday, Staub of The Carter but on the day he returns Center, one of many who home and is able to hold his have been moved by Buk youngest son, Kuot, for the Buk’s story, recently traveled first time, you might say he’ll to South Sudan for work and be born yet again. FA L L 2 019
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AFTER MANY FRUSTRATING YEARS TRYING TO START A FAMILY, COLLIN AND KRISTEN CHRISTENSEN FINALLY FOUND SUCCESS WITH THE HELP OF EMORY REPRODUCTIVE CENTER. AT LEFT (L–R): REESE, COLLIN, ADA, KRISTEN, AND MARIAN CHRISTENSEN PAUSE THEIR CONSTANT MOTION FOR A PHOTO SHOOT. RIGHT: REESE ENJOYS HER TIME IN THE SPOTLIGHT.
Big
Little
The Emory Reproductive Center helps would-be parents create families, with expertise and personal attention
Lives K BY M ART HA M C K E NZ I E
PHOT OGRAPHY B Y A NN WAT S O N AND ST EPHE N NO W L A ND
risten Christensen 14N used to hate Mother’s Day. She would go on a long run to pound out her frustrations on the pavement while all her friends, it seemed, celebrated the holiday with their babies and toddlers. Kristen and her husband, Collin, had been trying to have a baby since they married in 2006, but the pregnancy tests never came back positive. The worst part was they had no idea why. They were in their twenties, healthy, and neither knew of any reason that would keep them from conceiving. After six frustrating years, including visits to reproductive specialists, the couple decided to leave northern Virginia and move to Atlanta. “It was so hard watching all of our friends have babies, we just felt like we needed a fresh start,” says Kristen. “So we came to a new city and took a little time off from all the reproductive stress.”
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BEHIND THE SCENES (clockwise from top) Weitao Sun, one of ERC’s embryologists, uses a delicate micromanipulator to perform sperm injections, assisted hatching, and embryo biopsies for genetic testing. Liquid nitrogen tanks are charged weekly to preserve eggs, embryos, and sperm.
Kristen enrolled in Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, earning a BSN in 2014. She now works in the cardiac ICU at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Collin started doing carpentry work, which he built into a thriving custom woodworking business. In 2015, they decided they were ready to try again to start a family. Kristen found a website that ranked fertility clinics by success rates, and the Emory Reproductive Center (ERC) topped the list of Atlanta facilities, so they decided to start there. Once the couple met with the center’s medical director, Jennifer 26
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Kawwass, they knew they had found the right place. It wasn’t just that Kawwass spent several hours with them reviewing all their past records and discussing options. And it wasn’t just that she showed them the studies and data that backed up her recommendations. It was that Kawwass listened as well as she talked. “We have the utmost respect for this science, but you can get out of control with it and create thirty or more embryos,” says Kristen. “We wanted Dr. Kawwass to know from the
beginning that we considered every embryo to be a life, to be our child, so we didn’t want dozens of them. She respected and worked with our faith.” For Kawwass, that’s part of the job. “Our role is partly as educators, to lay out the options and the chances of success,” she says. “We can provide the medical facts, but a huge part of the equation is emotional. It’s up to each couple to decide what is best for them, and we work from there.” The Christensens went through one in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle that yielded five embryos. They implanted two and froze three. Thirty-seven weeks later, they welcomed twin girls, Ada and Reese. A couple of years later, they thawed the three embryos; one became their daughter Miriam. As a mother of three young children, “I’m exhausted at the end of every day, and it’s often hard to get out of bed in the morning,” Kristen says. “But my husband and I get to see our faces in them, and that was something I wasn’t sure we’d ever get.” She still takes a long run on Mother’s Day. But she spends the rest of the day with her own baby and toddlers.
HOW SOME BABIES ARE MADE The Christensens were among the thousand new patients treated by ERC each year. Located on a top floor of Emory University Hospital Midtown, the practice is home to five reproductive endocrinologists who are also on the faculty of Emory School of Medicine, a team of embryologists, a urologist, nurses, and staff. “We are committed to providing care that is founded in scientific evidence of benefit” says Kawwass. “It can be tempting to try something new or
en vogue that may not yet have proven safety or efficacy. Our physicians are also academics. We stay abreast of a rapidly evolving field while basing our treatments on sound, evidence-based data. Our affiliation with Emory University also means we train fellows in our practice, so we are surrounded by smart people asking tough questions. That keeps us driven to be able to provide sound, scientific answers as to why we do what we do.” For most patients, the first step of the journey is a round of tests to see if the cause of infertility can be identified. About 30 percent of infertility is caused by female reproductive problems, such as endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, fibroids, or age. Another 30 percent is male related, such as low sperm count or low sperm motility. The remaining 40 percent is a combination of male and female related factors or unexplained. Many of ERC’s patients start by trying intrauterine insemination (IUI)—depositing the male’s sperm via catheter directly into the woman’s uterus at the time of ovulation. The procedure has two main drawbacks— the chance of pregnancy is typically not more than 15 percent per attempt and, since many women take medications to stimulate egg production, the risk of having twins, triplets, or more is elevated. But compared with IVF, IUI is much less expensive and less physically burdensome on the female. “Unless the woman has a problem with her fallopian tubes or the man has an extremely low sperm count, many couples will try one to three cycles of IUI before moving on to IVF or other options, such as adoption,” says Jessica Spencer, division director of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at Emory School of Medicine.
If IUI doesn’t result in conception, many couples can—and do—chose IVF. Since the birth of the first “test-tube baby” in 1978, the procedure has exploded. Now more than 250,000 IVF cycles are performed each year, and they are responsible for 8 percent of all live births in the US. Several advances have made IVF safer and more effective. New medications and protocols have greatly reduced the risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, one of the more
serious potential complications of fertility treatments which now occurs in less than 1.5 percent of all cycles. Embryologists can now grow embryos longer in culture, increasing their likelihood of implantation. “We used to grow embryos two to three days and then implant or freeze them at the cleavage stage, which is when they are eight cells,” says Kawwass. “Now we can grow them for five or six days to the blastocyst stage, when they are about one hundred
We can provide the medical facts, but a huge part of the equation is emotional. It's up to each couple to decide what is best for them, and we work from there. —JENNIFER KAWWASS
FAMILY CHAMPIONS Jennifer Kawwass (left) and Jessica Spencer (right) make wishes come true for people who want children but are unable to conceive.
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PRICELESS Patrice Basanta-Henry and Frank Ski welcomed their daughter, Emerson, in March. The road to get her was emotionally and financially steep, but the path ahead is filled with hope.
cells. Likelihood of implantation is much higher for a single blastocyst embryo compared to a single cleavage embryo.” Couples can elect to do genetic testing on the embryos, particularly if either carries an inheritable disease. “We offer genetic carrier screening before treatment,” says Spencer. “This helps to identify couples that may be at risk of having a child with a rare genetic disease. It’s also important for women to consider before choosing a donor.” One such test is JScreen, a nonprofit genetic screening organization based at Emory. Embryos are graded by their appearance—symmetry, percent cell degradation—with As being outstanding, Bs being good, and so forth. The best quality embryos are transferred first. In certain individuals, a technique called assisted hatching can improve the chance of an embryo sticking to the uterine wall. These advances have boosted the success rate per IVF cycle in women under 35 percent to around 50 percent, 28
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which has promoted the practice of transferring just one embryo. In the 1980s and 1990s, doctors routinely implanted four embryos per cycle, resulting in an explosion of multiple births. Almost half of successful IVF cycles resulted in twins. A smaller but still significant number of cycles produced triplets or quintuplets. Multiple births create related problems for mothers and babies. Carrying more than one child increases a woman’s risk of gestational high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, anemia, and miscarriage. Sharing the womb increases the risk for premature birth, low birth weight, and birth defects for the infants. “Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in IVF is that we’ve been able to continue the success rates of the past ten years, but have dropped multiple gestation rates dramatically,” says Kawwass. “Nationwide, the focus has shifted from getting a woman pregnant as quickly as possible to getting the healthiest outcome at the
end of pregnancy, with a full-term birth at normal birth weight.” Since an IVF cycle typically produces several embryos, many couples choose to freeze some for future attempts.
WHEN THE CLOCK STARTS TICKING Since 2013, women have had another option to preserve their fertility—freezing their eggs. Reproductive endocrinologists have been able to freeze sperm and embryos for decades, but eggs are more delicate. An advance in freezing technology allows for eggs to be flash frozen, better preserving them. Women may choose to preserve their eggs before undergoing chemotherapy, hysterectomy, or gender transition. The lion’s share of egg freezing, however, is done by women who are simply not ready to have a baby. Perhaps they haven’t married yet. Or maybe they are in graduate school. Or they want to wait until they are in a better financial situation. For these women, egg-freezing
offers the potential to defy the the high of having fifteen eggs to the low of having only ticking clock. “It’s the age of the one embryo,” she says. egg that drives the chance of “I was devastated.” pregnancy, not the age of the Being an ob/gyn, Patrice uterus,” says Kawwass. “When was schooled in the intricacies, you freeze your eggs, they stop risks, and tradeoffs of fertilaging. So if you freeze your eggs ity treatments, and she told at twenty-nine, and then thaw Kawwass she wanted to be as and use them at thirty-nine, aggressive as possible, always you have the same chance of making sure some embryos a successful pregnancy as a were frozen even as she went twenty-nine-year-old.” through more retrieval cycles. That’s why Caroline “I always wanted to have the Osborne decided to freeze her IT'S A GIRL! With the help of an egg donor and a surrogate, Ty and insurance policy of having eggs in early 2018. She was Matt Moddelmog are expecting a girl in November. some frozen embryos for the thirty-four at the time, not next try,” she says. “Dr. Kawwass understood and respected in a relationship, and knew she wanted to have children my wishes.” eventually. She was happy to learn that her health insurance In the end, Patrice went through four unsuccessful IVF through Coca-Cola North America, where she works as a cycles, but on the fifth cycle, one little fighter survived. director in revenue-growth management, covered most of Emerson was born on March 2, 2019. the procedure. Though the cost, both emotional and financial, was She Googled egg-freezing in Atlanta, and the first article great, Frank and Patrice agree that being parents to Emerson to pop up was written by Kawwass. After meeting with her to is priceless. discuss the procedure, she decided to go forward. “After my “Everyone at Emory was so caring and supportive eggs were frozen, I felt this great sense of empowerment,” through the whole process,” she says. “My nurse, in parshe says. “I felt confident to live my life how I wanted to ticular, understood how hard it was for me to take care of live it without the pressure of worrying about missing the pregnant women all day and not be able to get pregnant window of starting a family.” myself. The whole team kept checking up on me, even Osborne is now engaged and planning an April after Emerson was born.” 2020 wedding. They plan to start trying to have a baby shortly afterward, but Osborne feels good knowing she has the possibility of trying IVF with her frozen eggs if that doesn’t work out. Patrice Basanta-Henry decided to freeze her eggs at thirty-eight. A maternal fetal medicine specialist, Patrice was divorced with no children and not in a relationship, but she knew she wanted to be a mom. As luck would have it, she met her future husband, Frank Ski, just as she was preparing to harvest her eggs for freezing. Frank, a popular Atlanta morning radio personality, had four grown children from a previous marriage, but he understood how important having a baby was to Patrice, so he agreed to go on the journey—a long and costly one. Patrice produced fifteen eggs to freeze. When they were thawed and fertilized with Frank’s sperm, six embryos survived. Due to Patrice’s age, they opted for genetic testing, and only one of the embryos tested normal. “I went from
HELPING SAME-SEX COUPLES ERC offers a host of other family building options. The center offers egg donation, sperm donation, embryo donation, and gestational surrogacy. These alternatives can be especially helpful for would-be parents in the LGBTQ community. Ty and Matt Moddelmog both knew they wanted to have children before they even met, nine years ago in New York. “I think we actually talked about it on our second date,” says Ty. The couple married, moved to Atlanta, and started new jobs—Matt at a start-up called Clutch Technologies and Ty at the Home Depot working on the in-store environment. When they decided they were ready to start a family last year, ERC happened to be their first stop. It became their last. “We went in and met with Dr. Spencer, and she spent FA L L 2 019
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so much time with us,” says Matt. “She instilled an enormous amount of confidence, and she made us feel totally comfortable.” Spencer referred the couple to a surrogate agency, which independently matched them with a surrogate. “We first met over the phone and fell hard,” says Ty. “It was clear that she herself is an amazing mother with two wonderful daughters and a loving husband—a great support network to help us through a really important time in all of our lives. We love joining her for doctor’s appointments and even get together socially.” ERC joined the donor’s eggs with Ty’s sperm to produce several embryos, one of which was transferred to the surrogate, who is due to deliver their daughter in mid-November. Ty and Matt plan to head back to ERC soon afterward to try for a second baby.
‘SIX YEARS OF OUR LIVES’ The expertise and personalized focus of ERC is perhaps most useful in the most difficult cases. “Throughout the IVF process, we make day-to-day decisions based on how the body responds to treatment and based on the underlying factors contributing to infertility,” says Kawwass. “These decisions include things like adjustment of medication doses, timing of trigger [release of the eggs], timing of transfer, number of embryos to transfer, use of preimplantation genetic testing, and much more. The beauty of ERC is that the physicians work as a team to develop a plan that incorporates the patient’s personal priorities and also
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their individualized medical response to treatment, which may evolve over the course of an IVF cycle. There is a true ‘art’ to fertility treatment—there is not one clear path. The decision of how to proceed involves a very detailed approach to consider the pros and cons of each intervention and next step for an individual patient.” Korynn Schooley and Jared Serwer decided to go to an Atlanta fertility clinic after Korynn had two miscarriages in the same year. Two unsuccessful IUI cycles led to more heartbreak and frustration with a process they felt was impersonal and rushed. So Korynn and Jared came to ERC for a second opinion. “Dr. Spencer spent so much time with us during our first meeting,” says Korynn. “She had already read our chart before we got there and knew our entire history. She was ready with research. She explained how things worked and the likelihood of different methods being successful. She said she thought we had a decent chance.” Spencer started Korynn on an IVF regimen with a different protocol. The regimen leading up to egg retrieval was intense. Korynn needed two injections of fertility medications a day plus another injection to potentially help prevent miscarriages. In the beginning, she wasn’t able to give them to herself, so the job fell to Jared. First, the medications for each cycle would arrive via FedEx on dry ice. For each injection, Jared retrieved six vials of different medications from the basement refrigerator, drew the contents of the first vial into a syringe, injected it into the second, let it mix, drew it back up in the syringe and then
repeated the process down the line until he had mixed the correct cocktail. “The shots had to be given within a specific window of time,” says Jared. “Mornings and evenings were no problem, but at midday I’d drive from my midtown office to her south Atlanta office, draw up all the medications, give her the shot, and drive back. Every day.” Despite all the effort, Korynn’s first IVF cycle was not successful. Korynn was expecting a similar result after her second IVF cycle, so she took the day off work. But the office called with good news. She was pregnant. After an uneventful pregnancy, Korynn and Jared welcomed Ethan on November 6, 2013. The couple was quickly back at ERC to try for a second child. After multiple cycles with two pregnancies, both ending in miscarriages, they decided to try a new approach.
This was our Hail Mary. This was going to be our last attempt before we turned to donor eggs or adoption. —KORYNN SCHOOLEY
WORTH THE WAIT Jared Serwer and Korynn Schooley went through multiple rounds of IVF over six years to get their sons, Ethan (age 5) and Caleb (age 2). Today their lives are rough and tumble and joyous.
Korynn was now forty, so she started to bank embryos. She went through three back-to-back egg retrievals, which ultimately resulted in twelve embryos. This time they decided to have them genetically tested. Only one came back normal, and it was given a low grade. After talking through the pros and cons with ERC, they implanted it anyway, but Korynn did not get pregnant. Devastated, the couple decided to try one last time. “This was our Hail Mary,” says Korynn. “This was going to be our last attempt before we turned to donor eggs or adoption.” Spencer decided to dial back the measures they had been using to see if Korynn’s body would respond better to minimal stimulation. Korynn took a lower dose and started taking her medications later in the cycle. Spencer and
the Emory team made adjustments along the way as they monitored Korynn’s response. Shortly after the transfer, the couple flew to Washington, D.C., to celebrate Jared’s mother’s birthday. When they got off the plane in Washington National, Korynn’s phone rang. “All of the nurses from the office were on the call, and they just screamed, ‘You’re pregnant! Congratulations!’ ” she says. Caleb was born May 9, 2017. Ethan and Caleb are great buddies, and Korynn and Jared are enjoying their boys every day. “Six years of our lives were given over to this process,” says Korynn. “I feel like the only reason we have children is because of Emory. If we had to go through this very difficult process, at least it was with them.”
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>>TH E MI CHAEL C. CARLOS MUSEUM
MUMMY VIEWING ROOM
1876: A museum is formed on Emory’s original campus in Oxford, Georgia, displaying objects such as artifacts collected by Methodist missionaries and Emory faculty working in Asia.
1921: William Arthur Shelton, a professor in Candler School of Theology, purchases an Old Kingdom mummy from the sacred site of Abydos in Middle Egypt. After spending more than ninety years in storage, it will be conserved and go on view as the oldest mummy in the Western Hemisphere.
1954: Woolford Baker is named director of the museum. He initiates programs for local schools and establishes the muse1919: The Emory University um as a valuable resource Museum is founded on the Druid for all ages. Hills campus to “preserve and display university collections of 1985: With the support of local philanthropist ethnic, biological, geological, Michael C. Carlos, the muarchaeological, and historical material.” seum moves into the old
law school building, whose renovation is designed by Michael Graves. When it reopens as the Emory Museum of Art and Archaeology, it presents a reorganized collection that aligns with Emory’s teaching and research.
1993: An expanded museum, also supported by Carlos and designed by Graves, opens as the Michael C. Carlos Museum.
which was going out of business. 2003: The museum makes international headlines by returning a mummy believed to be royalty to Egypt.
1999: The Carlos Museum acquires 2018: The museum the Egyptian collecopens the renovattion of the Niagara ed Morgens West Falls Museum, Foundation Galleries of Ancient Near Eastern Art.
THALIA N. AND MICHAEL C. CARLOS
2019: The museum celebrates its centennial by announcing the gift of the Senusret Collection, offering one hundred free admission days, and hosting a live reading of the Iliad.
>>L AN E Y GRADUATE SCHOOL
the first woman to enroll for credit at Emory, earned her law degree, and the first year that women could vote in national elections after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. JAMES T. LANEY
1919: Emory’s Graduate School was organized as a distinct division of the university in 1919 with thirty-six graduate students enrolled. The first degree awarded was an MA to Charles Starnes. 1920: The first woman to earn a graduate degree from Emory was Cecelia Branham 1917G—coincidentally, the same year that Eléonore Raoul 1920L, 32
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lishes the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, which served as a multidisciplinary program until 2017 and continues today for undergraduates.
1962: Robert Steele was the first 1948: The first blue African American and gold doctor’s to register for hood was draped credit at Emory in on the shoulders 1962. He enrolled of Thomas Johnas a part-time ston 40C 41G as he student in a special received the first program in the Emory PhD degree, Graduate School. in chemistry. 1965: The Gradu1952: The Gradu- ate School offers an ate School estabMA degree in twen-
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ty-three subjects, an MS degree in eleven, an MAT in eight, a master of education, and a master of librarianship. 2009: The Graduate School is named for James Laney, president of Emory from 1977 to 1993. 2019: The Laney Graduate School celebrates its centennial and the legacy of 16,118 graduate students. THE LANEY GRADUATE SCHOOL
> >TH E EMORY WHEEL
THE EMORY WHEEL — MARCH 19, 1920
1919: Chartered by the Student Government Association, Emory’s independent student newspaper is founded as the Emory Wheel—a play on emery wheel—to “sharpen the intellect of the university community.” 1970: An editorial leadership dust-up spawns a competitor newspaper, the Emory New Times; the two eventually merged and settled their differences. 1972: Noted author Carl Hiaasen 74C begins to develop his trademark irreverent style as a frequent contributor of satirical humor columns to the Wheel (he went on to graduate from the University of Florida); the Wheel claims many illustrious Emory alumni as former staff members and editors. 2015: The Wheel significantly boosts its online and social media presence while going from two to one print issue per week. 2016: An independent editorial board for the Wheel is formed, which discusses and develops the paper’s official opinion on campus, local, and national issues. 2019: The Wheel continues to print three thousand copies weekly for the campus community, produced entirely by students.
LET’S PARTY LIKE IT’S
1919 Emory anniversaries abound,
bringing landmark celebrations
I
t was a big year for Emory.
Four years after the university was granted a charter in DeKalb County in 1915, Emory College joined the law school, the theology school, and the preclinical program of the medical school on the Druid Hills campus. That same year, 1919, the graduate and business schools became distinct divisions and the university’s museum and independent student newspaper were established. Happy 100 to all. (Not to be outdone, Greek Life is celebrating 150.)
THE R ES T, AS THEY S AY, IS HIS TORY. FIN D THE S C HEDU L E OF R EMAIN IN G AN N IV ER S ARY EV EN TS AT EMORY.EDU /MAGAZIN E.
> >GO IZUETA BUS I NESS SCHOOL 1936: The school moves to its home in the C. L. Fishburne Building. 1947: The school receives a gift from the Rich Foundation, facilitating a move into a building of its own. (As enrollment increases, the school
will move into the first of two buildings at 1300 Clifton Road, due to a gift from the Woodruff Foundation.) 1954: The full-time MBA program is launched. 1994: The school is named in honor of Roberto C. Goizu-
CLOSING BELL NYSE
eta, former chair and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company.
2019: Ranked among the top-20 US business schools, 2009: The closing Goizueta continues bell of the NYSE is to drive business rung in the Jenkins forward with marCourtyard, the first ket-relevant degree time ever that the and non-degree bell has been rung programs, faculty research, and strafrom any educational institution. tegic initiatives.
C. L. FISHBURNE BUILDING
1919: The dean of Emory College recommends the creation of a school of economics and business administration. The Board of Trustees approved the motion the same day. The purpose of the school is public service, training in business methods, and “training in social efficiency alongside financial development.”
ROBERTO GOIZUETA
>>GR E E K LI FE AT EMORY
2002: The first Greek multicultural organization (Delta Phi Lambda Sorority, Inc.) was founded at Emory 2011: The Multicultural Greek Council was established FRATERNITY LIFE
1869: The Board of Trustees lifts the ban on fraternities imposed twelve years earlier and gives official sanction to national chapters of Chi Phi and Kappa Alpha. 1959: The Emory Panhellenic Council is created, chartering nine national sororities, now celebrating six decades on campus. 34
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2016: Lambda Sigma Upsilon 1976: Alpha Phi becomes Emory’s Alpha becomes the first Latino fraterniuniversity’s first ty and a member of African American the Multicultural fraternity, bringing Greek Council. to campus the National Pan-Hellenic 2019: Approximately 30 percent Council, which of Emory students now serves eight chapters at Emory. belong to one of
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thirty-five Greek organizations. Members have earned collective GPAs near 3.5, have donated more than
SORORITY LIFE
$75,000 to philanthropies, and have given more than twenty-five thousand hours to community service.
THE PLACE HOLDER University His-
torian Gary Hauk served at Emory for more than thirty-six years—fourteen as secretary of the university— and three decades as adviser to four Emory presidents. He has pub-
lished four books about Emory, the most recent being Emory as Place:
Meaning in a University Landscape.
As President Claire E. Sterk writes in
the book’s introduction, “The history of a university resides not just in its archives but also in the place
itself―the walkways and bridges,
the libraries and classrooms, the gardens and creeks winding their way
across campus.” In an excerpt on the
following pages, Hauk speaks for the university’s trees.
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z
The
Trees in the Forest Let us begin the Emory story with the oldest living inhabitants of the place— the trees. How old some of them are, it’s hard to say. Those whose age we know, however, have stories and legends worth sharing. Here is one.
In
AMONG THE TREES The first bridge onto campus, circa 1918, crosses over a ravine to a tree-lined path.
the town of Oxford, students
banded together in 1837 to form
the Phi Gamma literary society. In 1851, if
the records are accurate, the Phi Gammas completed the construction of their own
building on a corner of the college green.
A hundred and fifty years later, at the turn of the new millennium, the structure had
for the number of rings, someone figured
that the tree had taken root before 1650—
nearly two centuries before Emory College enrolled its first students.
I do not know whether anyone thought
served briefly as a place to care for the
who felled it viewed it as an infinitesimally
wounded and dying after the Battle of
Atlanta in 1864. But by 2000, architects
usable. To preserve this bit of campus
history, the university spent a year giving
the building a major makeover. That work
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the new building, and counting backward
to give thanks for the life of that tree when
the debates of young men and had even
structural repairs would keep the building
36
tree had been felled in 1850 or 1851 for
aged poorly. It had once resounded with
and engineers reported that only major
To read more, get Hauk’s book, Emory as Place (University of Georgia Press, 2019). Royalties will be donated to the Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.
more than two hundred. Assuming that the
led to a fascinating discovery. A wooden
beam holding up the floor of Phi Gamma
had to be replaced, and when workers re-
moved the beam and counted the rings of the tree it once had been, they numbered
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it was cut down. More likely, the woodsman small part of the continent’s inexhaustible supply of lumber. The earliest images of the Druid Hills campus show the beginnings of a school in a forest. This had
been the sense of the founders of Emory College in Oxford as well. The groves of
academe were filled with actual trees for
many years in both places. Even as late as the 1960s, large stands of pine and oak gave the Druid Hills campus a sense of
being far removed from the city only a few miles away.
y Yet what interests
me is not the forest but the trees—those polestraight loblolly pines that stand like lonely
sentinels here or there, or the thick-trunked oaks that guard the Quadrangle, or the white-blossomed
ancient magnolias
that screen the Baker Woodland.
Some of these
arboreal individuals
have gained enough eminence over time
to have earned their own
name. Some, so to speak,
have their own family tree. Consider the many
offspring of a particular East
Palatka holly. A story passed down through the decades
recounts a visit by university chancellor Warren Candler
to St. Simons Island with his wife, Antoinette, or “Nettie.”
Both John and Charles Wes-
1921 lives on the internet
East Palatka holly bush, “the
brings with it the recollection
Knight’s Georgia Landmarks,
the campus.
who rallied around his family
and appears in Lucian Lamar Memorials, and Legends.
In a pilgrimage to that live
oak with her husband, Mrs.
Candler spotted a small holly bush growing out of shallow dirt in the crook of one of
the tree’s massive, twisting
branches. Most likely a seed left by a visiting bird had
taken root on the branch. Ac-
Wesley Holly,” still flourish on Of the planting of trees,
Emory cannot now get
enough. Emory plants trees
to celebrate new presidents and to honor departing
presidents; to recognize
distinguished service and to welcome new classes of students.
Of all the trees on the
cording to lore, she uprooted
campus, the one dearest to
it back to Atlanta for trans-
bench in front of the entrance
the little holly and brought
planting on the Emory Quadrangle. Years later, that holly had to be cut down, but not
before groundskeepers took
cuttings from it, rooted them, and planted them around
the campus. Here and there, descendants of that original
me is the Nuttall oak near a to Carlos Hall. The tree has
no plaque at its base to identify it, though many Emory
people know its story. It hon-
of an exquisite community
during seven weeks of hos-
pice care in a hellish summer. “The Thomas tree,” as many call it, represents a remark-
able chapter of compassion among Emory people. Two
weeks after Thomas’s death, faculty and students and
friends gathered around that
young oak to speak a litany of grace and remembrance. And then a bagpiper—one from
the pipe band that leads the
Emory Commencement procession each year—skirled
the tune of “Amazing Grace.” In some ways at Emory it
ors the memory of my son,
is the amazing grace of the
disease at the age of sixteen.
spirit green. So long as we
Thomas, who fell victim to
The memory of his passing
trees that keeps the human remember them.
CAMPUS IN A FOREST Trees were valued and protected on the Oxford and Druid Hills campuses from their inception. These lush views (top left, clockwise) capture Lullwater, circa 1958; Dickey Drive construction (originally Pierce Drive), and the ravine behind the law building, circa 1925.
ley, the founders of Methodism, had ministered to
American Indians and English colonists around Savannah
and on the barrier island St.
Simons in 1736, shortly after the founding of the colo-
ny of Georgia. The Wesley brothers often preached
outdoors, and tradition held
that one particular large and impressive live oak tree on
St. Simons had shaded them
during services of prayer and preaching. The tree came
to be known as the Wesley Oak, and a photo of it from
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BY KIMBER WILLIAMS
A PROMISE KEPT The first recipient of a special 9/11 scholarship starts his second year at Emory College
This story begins with a promise.
PHOTOGRAPHY DEMETRIUS FREEMAN
A
few months after hijacked passenger planes carried out coordinated terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., then—Emory President William Chace called a family meeting. Throughout the nation, the pain of those events was still raw and palpable, and even today, President Chace remembers the urgency that compelled him to bring together Emory alumni from throughout that grief-stricken city. And so they came, gathering at the University Club in midtown Manhattan to remember the thousands killed in those attacks, including three Emory alumni, the husband of an Emory alumna, the parent of a student then attending Emory, and the sister of a faculty member. It was a large crowd, and looking around the room, Chace recalls a gathering infused with heartfelt emotion. “We were all hurting, and in those days many people felt the sense of being part of a larger family—a time of gathering closer, a feeling that we were all in this together.” That same month, Andrea Shindelman Russin 89C received a letter. It arrived amid a torrent of sup-
port and sympathy that had flooded her mailbox after the World Trade Center attacks. So much mail, in fact, that a small army of kind-hearted volunteers had stepped forward to help her open it all in those hazy days following 9/11. But this one stood out. The letterhead announced that it was from the Office of the President of Emory University. “Dear Mrs. Russin . . .” it began. “On behalf of Emory University, I write to you to express our deepest sympathies on the terrible loss you suffered on September 11. Everyone in the large family that makes up the life of this university is aware that, within our number, great pain has come and a part of ourselves has been taken away . . .” For Andrea, the loss was indeed unfathomable. Her husband, thirty-two-year-old Steven H. Russin, was working on the 104th floor of the North Tower at the World Trade Center, where he served as a securities trader for the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, when the first plane struck. Their son, Alec, was two years old. Fraternal twins, Olivia Sabrina Gail and Ariella Sarah Dayle, were born by Caesarean section four days after their father’s death. Leaving the hospital afterward, every flag they passed flew at half-staff.
PROUD PARENT Alec and Andrea Russin at home in New Jersey.
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FAMILY BOND Alec was two when his father, Steven (left, with Alec), was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. His mother, Andrea, gave birth to Alec’s younger sisters, twins Olivia and Ariella (above), four days later. “Back then,” she says, “there was a village that emerged, and Emory became a part of that village, standing by us.”
She joined five different grief groups, including one comprised of sixty World Trade Center widows. In her town alone she knew of four women who lost husbands in the attack. And there, in the midst of it all, was a letter from Emory, offering “to acknowledge her loss in a way that keeps memory alive and the Emory family as strong as it can be,” President Chace wrote. “For that reason, the university wishes to support your son, Alec Joseph, and your daughters, Ariella Sarah Dayle and Olivia Sabrina Gail, should they be admitted at any time in the future to a baccalaureate degree program at Emory College, Goizueta Business School, or the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing . . .” “Back then, there was a village that emerged, and Emory became part of that village, standing by us,” Andrea recalls. “Emory has always shown its 40
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commitment to its community. Once you are a student, you are always a part of the Emory family.” On instinct, she made three copies of the letter. Securing a fire-proof safety deposit box, she placed one copy safely inside.
A Big Impression It was more than thirty years ago that Andrea found her own path to Emory. At the time, Emory’s reach was expanding far beyond the regional South, and it had been suggested that she consider checking out the Atlanta campus. So it was that Emory became one more stop on a family trip to visit colleges up and down the East Coast, starting in Washington, D.C., and sweeping southward into Florida. Arriving at Emory, she vividly recalls being greeted by Rita Duffy, a receptionist in the admission office widely known for the warmth and ease she brought to her job. “She was an icon in her day,” Andrea laughs. “Everybody knew her, and if you met her, you never forgot her.” Instead of engaging with her parents, Duffy began chatting with Andrea, asking how her trip was going, what schools she’d visited and her thoughts about them. It was an instant point of connection, and one that Andrea remembers to this day. “She was talking to me, not my parents,” Andrea says. “As a seventeen-year-old, that made a very big impression. There was a warmth and intimacy on the most basic level, and moving across the rest of the university, I found a similar feeling.” The visit clinched her decision. She arrived at Emory eager to attend a school where former President Jimmy Carter was a professor, intent on studying journalism in a town that was developing a robust new twenty-four-hour-cycle news concept. In fact, she would eventually secure an internship at CNN, working on a political beat. In time, a broad exposure to the liberal arts would expand her focus. She graduated as a philosophy and sociology major. “Emory changed me,” she says. “It allowed you to think in an entirely different way, learning with people who had so many different experiences and ideas.” Andrea would go on to earn master’s degrees from NYU in psychology and occupational therapy.
P H O T O G R A P H Y C O U R T E S Y O F R U S S I N FA M I LY
The days that followed were a blur. At times, Andrea felt as if the entire world was reaching out with support, including beloved college friends from across the country who called or flew in to help care for her children. She recalls a team of uniformed firefighters from New York City arriving by fire engine to babysit. One day, a professional model showed up, announced she was there to clean Andrea’s shelves, piled her hair atop her head, and started pulling out dishes.
In 1994, she met her future husband at a bar in the World Financial Center, a few blocks from the twin towers. That night, he walked her to a bus stop to make sure she arrived safely. They married two years later; in 1998 they moved to Randolph, New Jersey, starting a family with the birth of Alec. Today, living in Princeton, New Jersey, the Russins remain a proud Emory family. In a town where many houses fly a banner bearing the year they graduated from Princeton, her own yard flag and license plate cover promote Emory. “We stand out,” Andrea laughs. For Alec, growing up in a university town carried expectations that he would choose Princeton. There would be opportunities to be considered at other universities, too. Once Alec reached high school, Andrea hoped that he would consider Emory. But that choice, she decided, would be Alec’s alone.
out the door to work when his wife called out, “Don’t you know what’s happening? Turn on the television.” Their sons, Brian and Jonathan Cohen 95C, were working downtown; their parents were relieved to learn they were both safe. But for weeks, there would be a rolling procession of funerals at their local synagogue and churches throughout the city. Following the attacks, Cohen and his wife, Michele, had quickly reported to a hospital to donate blood, only to be turned away. “They couldn’t handle the outpouring of volunteers,” he recalls. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the Cohens were already talking to Emory about funding a student scholarship; something merit-based that could truly impact young lives. Cohen’s own commitment to Emory was well-established. He had arrived at Emory in 1960 intent on earning a bachelor’s degree in history
before perhaps going on to law school. “From the day I first visited as a senior in high school to graduation, what stood out to me was the camaraderie, gentility, and friendliness that I found here,” he says. “I basically fell in love with the school and made lifelong friendships.” In addition to working with a range of corporate and philanthropic boards, Cohen would go on to serve on the Emory Board of Visitors. Learning that Emory had offered to help the children of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, Cohen was pleased, but not surprised. “It was simply the right thing to do,” he says. At the February 2002 alumni gathering, there was an announcement: The Cohens would dedicate the corpus of the scholarship they’d been building to support any student gaining admission to Emory over the next twenty-five years who was the
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESTY OF WILLIAM COHEN
The Seed of an Idea In February 2002, nearly six months after September 11, Emory hosted another alumni gathering. This time, some 275 people assembled at the Clifton Wharton Auditorium in midtown Manhattan to honor both the victims and heroes of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The mood of the evening was somber, but hopeful. William Cohen 64C, a lifelong New Yorker, was present that night, as he had been at Emory’s gathering only a few months earlier—an event that, for Cohen, planted the seed of an idea. On the morning of the attack, Cohen, a real estate developer and CEO of Andover Properties, was on his way
PASS IT ON William Cohen says that for him and his wife, meeting Alec Russin has “only strenghtened the realization that our decision was the right one. He will use his education well.” Alec is the first recipient of the Cohen 9/11 Scholarship.
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child of a victim of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, or Washington, D.C. It would be called the Cohen 9/11 Scholarship, providing the financial means to follow through on President Chace’s promise.
A New Generation When it came to choosing a college, Alec had a few requirements. “From the beginning, I was very much against choosing a school that required me to declare my major coming in,” he says. “And I wanted a campus that offered a good culture, a place where I could see myself fitting in.” His first visit to campus happened to coincide with the Emory School of Medicine’s Match Day. Initially, Alec felt utterly out of place. Navigating a campus awash in white doctor’s coats, he knew that wasn’t his path. Later, while touring another nearby campus, he pulled his mother aside. “Let’s go back to Emory,” he said. At second glance, he liked what he saw: A diverse student body; people who weren’t afraid to be individuals; a culture that embraced art, academics, and creativity. While visiting Oxford College, Alec noticed a student wearing a t-shirt promoting a band that he admired. Noting his interest, the student approached, high-fived him, and exchanged contact information. They would text for weeks— an organic point of connection. Andrea was thrilled. Not only that her son had found what she’d also loved about Emory, but a campus community that genuinely felt like a good fit. As a child of 9/11, Alec knows both private pain and public scrutiny. His father exists for him primarily in photographs and treasured stories: This good-natured man who loved chocolate, telling jokes, and sports of every stripe. A guy with an irrepressible sense of fun, who thought nothing of trading Pokémon cards with neighborhood kids or dressing up as Spiderman for Halloween. 42
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PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF TODD MONAGHAN
AMERICAN BEAUTY While touring Emory, Alec and his mother, Andrea, visited the atrium of the Woodruff P. E. Center to see American Beauty 9/11, a painting by alumnus Todd Monaghan. A plaque beside it honors members of the Emory community lost in the tragedy, and includes his father’s name.
While touring Emory, the Russins made a point of visiting the atrium of the Woodruff Physical Education Center to see “American Beauty 911”—a painting by artist and filmmaker Todd Monaghan 86B. Beside it, a plaque honors “those members of the Emory community lost in the tragedies of 911,” and it includes his father’s name. Andrea wanted her son to see it, to know it—a reminder that there are people who care about him. “Emory has always shown its commitment to the community,” she says. “Once you are a student at Emory, you are part of their family.” Last fall, Alec became the first recipient of the Cohen 9/11 Scholarship. During his first year, Alec found his own path, choosing a major—a dual degree program that encompasses studying economics at Emory and industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology— discovering a love of statistics, and pledging a fraternity. With a background playing in rock bands throughout high school —most recently, the pop punk/post-hardcore Cold Soil—he helped found the Emory Musicians Network. During the summer, Alec had a chance to have lunch with the Cohens. Meeting Alec has “only strenghtened the realization that our decision was the right one,” Cohen says. “He will use his education well.” In a sense, he adds, the fulfillment of Emory’s promise through this scholarship underscores the resilience of young people—and the entire nation. “As Benjamin Franklin said, ‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,’ ” Cohen says. “That’s why we believe in paying it forward.”
E M ORY E V E RY W H E R E
40 ANNOUNCING THE 2019 CL ASS OF THE EMORY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION’S
UNDER FORTY
Emory’s Office of Alumni and Constituent Engagement 40 Under Forty awards program annually spotlights young alumni who have made a significant impact in fields including business, art, medicine, science, and academia. MULTITALENTED (clockwise from top) Conductor John Devlin 08C, health care VP Matthew
Harrison 04C, and emergency nurse practitioner April Turner Hill 05N are three of the alumni honored by this year’s 40 Under Forty program.
VISIT ALUMNI.EMORY.EDU/40MAG F OR PROFILES ON NOT JUST THEIR C AREERS, BUT WHO THEY ARE. FA L L 2 019
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E M ORY E V E RY W H E R E
Robbie Brown 07C, general manager, Bloomberg
lens doesn’t exclude anyone
After serving as editor of the
Michael Curry 02B, CEO, Krueger-Gilbert Health Physics
Emory Wheel, Robbie Brown worked for five years as an Atlanta-based reporter for
Michael Curry Jr. is CEO
to the business side of
Physics and the co-managing
the New York Times. Drawn media, he went on to Columbia Business School and is
now general manager of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum and former chief of
Ana Amato 07MBA, managing director, Protiviti Recently named the Protiviti
2018 Working Mother of the
Year, Ana Amato has been with the California-based global
consulting firm since 2006. In addition to serving as man-
aging director in the internal
from that magic.”
staff and head of corporate
strategy for Bloomberg Media. Recently married and training for the New York Marathon,
Brown also was instrumental in gathering world business
leaders at a three-day event in Beijing to talk about how
the global economy business is changing.
of Krueger-Gilbert Health
partner and director of Seneca Creek Partners, a private in-
vestment fund. Before earning an MBA from the University of Chicago, Curry founded Phoenix Bespoke, a men’s
custom tailoring business.
Now he works with partners to buy companies and then
grow them. “We are focused
on making sure that there are opportunities for people of
color and women,” says Curry. “Making sure that you know
we’re supportive of everyone,
but that the diverse voices are
audit and financial advisory
Roshani Chokshi 13C, fiction writer
firm’s diversity efforts and
As news editor of the Emory
business is really important
of its women’s network. She
ized that she wanted to find
Mu chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha.
Now a New York Times– best-
him to new experiences and
young adults, she creates
you to such a rich and diverse
area, Amato is a leader in the started the Atlanta chapter
chairs the advisory board of
Executive Women of Goizueta and oversees the Protiviti
Atlanta Community Scholarship program, which works
with the Boys and Girls Club to identify candidates. Originally from Honduras, Amato also is involved with the Georgia Asylum and Immigration
Network, which provides free
legal services to the immigrant community. She credits her success to her partnership
with her husband and has two girls, seven and four. 44
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heard, particularly as it relates to senior leadership roles in
Wheel, Roshani Chokshi real-
for us.” Curry is active in the
her voice as a fiction writer.
He credits Emory for exposing
-selling author of books for
ideas, saying, “Emory exposes
stories and characters that
set of scholars, the likes of
reflect her own Filipino and
Indian heritage, especially in
the retelling of “myths where you can reinterpret power dynamics,” says Chokshi.
“You can find a version of Cin-
which you are unlikely to replicate in the real world.”
Reshma Dalia 01B, chief financial officer, Alliant Specialty Group
derella across every cultural
Named a 2012 Woman to
of shared human experience,
Reshma Dalia was promot-
spectrum. They are stories and just because you are
showing it with a different FA L L 2 019
Watch by Business Insurance, ed to chief financial officer
of Alliant Specialty Group, a
branch of Alliant Insurance Services, where she is re-
sponsible for leading opera-
tional, financial, and strategic
growth initiatives across nine business areas. Previously, Dalia served as senior vice
president of operations and finance for Alliant’s Con-
struction Services Group,
where she helped grow the operation from four offices
with one hundred employees
in 2011 to twenty-five offices with 475 employees in 2016. She also has been named
co–chair of the Diversity and
Inclusion Committee at Alliant
Insurance Services. Dalia says success comes from taking
initiative, motivation, and hard work. “Once you combine
those three things, you’ve
got to surround yourself with mentors you respect and
a manager who will assist
in cultivating your career,”
says Dalia, who has an MBA from the Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern University.
John Devlin 08C, musical director, Hawaii Youth Symphony
to conduct orchestras while
Public Health, Foster worked
stints at Manheim, McKes-
It was big enough, however,
create awareness and safety
and Comcast. Harrison was
As musical director of the
members of the Atlanta
Hawaii Youth Symphony and
artistic director of the Pacific Music Institute, John Devlin
serves as muse to seven hundred young students in seven orchestras, a jazz program,
a beginning music program,
in my undergraduate years. to provide me lessons with Symphony, and to have a
performing arts venue as
astounding as the Schwartz
Center. I owe my career to Emory’s ability to tailor education to an individual.”
and a beginning band. Prior
in the areas of HIV and TB to
for the LGBTQ community. To someone hoping to follow in their footsteps, Foster says:
“Be brave and take the classes that you think you’ll fail to gain the skill sets you need. It’s a
period of time where resourc-
es are endless, so play to your strengths but also disrupt your norms.”
to this role, Devlin performed with the Princeton Sympho-
Orchestra in Washington, D.C.,
Matthew Harrison 04C, vice president of human resources, Jackson Healthcare
Symphony, a concert series
joined Jackson Healthcare as
ny Orchestra, conducted
for the National Symphony and co-founded Gourmet
classical music. “Our goal is
ence of attending a symphony concert, and to create a
and musical arts,” he says. In ruff Scholar was one of only
Marcel Foster has combined
across the country to receive
with global health to work
2007, the Robert W. Woodtwenty-two college juniors
a $32,000 Beinecke Schol-
arship for graduate study. “At Emory, I was able to train as
a professional musician, but also maintain a breadth of
involvement in other areas
and activities that would not
have been possible at another school. I played in the orchestra, was given opportunities
to conduct, ran on the varsity track and cross-country
teams, and also majored in
Latin,” he says. “Because Em-
ory was small enough to offer
such opportunities, I was able
a background in theater
for positive change at the
local and global levels. Now a public health consultant with Deloitte, Foster previously studied performance and social behavior through a
scientific lens while researching chimpanzees with the
Jane Goodall Institute. The resulting published papers led to a collaboration with
robotics professors at Harvard University, which ended
up in a dance studio with a
performance by robots and
humans. At Rollins School of
named a Man of Influence by
the National Urban League. As
a creator of associate network groups, “I’ve structured them to highlight the value they
bring to the organization, both from a recruitment and reten-
tion perspective for future associates, and in making goals
more innovative in the way we think about doing work.”
ble for planning, directing, and
A graduate of the second-ev-
and administrative service
Woodruff School of Nursing
overseeing human resources
Marcel Foster 17PH, public health consultant, Deloitte
synergy between the culinary
Power 30 Under 30 and was
vice president of human re-
sources, where he is responsi-
also to modernize the experi-
recognized as one of Atlanta’s
April Hill 05N, director of the Emergency Nurse Practitioner Program, Arizona State University
Last year, Matthew Harrison
that pairs local cuisine with
son, the Weather Company,
functions for operating companies and leads delivery in
HR metrics and reporting, job and compensation analysis, performance management,
organizational development, change management, and employee relations. The
third-largest US health care staffing firm by revenue,
Jackson Healthcare is made
up of specialized health care
staffing companies that help 1,300 healthcare facilities
serve more than seven million patients annually. Harrison also serves as a clinical
assistant professor of in-
dustrial and organizational
psychology at the University of Georgia, where he earned
a PhD. Previous roles include FA L L 2 019
er class of the Nell Hodgson
Emergency Nurse Practitioner (ENP) program, April Hill is a leader in the field. This fall,
she’ll become the director for the ENP program at Arizona
State University. “Emory really set me up to pioneer the ENP program at Arizona State,
within my own hospital and my own physician group,”
says Hill. “I have a legitimate
seat at the table because of
my Emory degree.” A mother of four—all under the age of
three—Hill says she loves the excitement, the variety of the work, the team atmosphere, and the ability to check her
work at the door. “I go, work hard, and give it all I’ve got,”
says Hill. “Then I come home and get to be a mom.”
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E M ORY E V E RY W H E R E
As managing attorney for the Texas-based Community Justice Program, Sarah Dingivan 05C 09L works to connect indigent, at-risk, and vulnerable community members with meaningful pro bono legal assistance. A managing director of global client partnerships for Facebook, JD Doughney 12MBA sets strategy and cultivates key relationships for one of the world’s top social media brands.
Allyson Gold 11L is an as-
sistant professor of clinical legal instruction and director of the Elder Law Clinic at the University of Alabama, where she teaches the fundamentals of legal practice through direct client representation and advocacy, and helps her students promote access to justice.
Jonathan Gonen 04C is co-
founder of TeleSign Corporation, a mobile identity company that provides two-factor authentication to protect user privacy for some of the largest companies in the world.
Alisha Gordon 15T is exec-
utive minister of programs at Riverside Church in New York City, an institution with a long history of social justice and LGBTQ acceptance.
Ben Farley 11L is a trial attor-
ney and law-of-war counsel at the US Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization. He is assigned to the team representing Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five codefendants in the 9/11 conspiracy case who face capital charges before the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Lauren Giles 03C is a partner
in Alston and Bird’s Financial Services and Products Group and serves on the firm’s Atlanta Diversity Committee, with a particular focus on lawyers who are first-generation college graduates. 46
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A public health researcher addressing the opioid epidemic in the US, Gery Guy 06PH 10G is a senior health economist on the Health Systems Team in the Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The first black LGBTQ ordained priest in the Episcopal diocese of Atlanta, Kim Jackson 09T is now an associate rector at All Saints’ Episcopal Church. She has set her sights on the Georgia State Senate with the goal of protecting women’s and LGBTQ rights.
Mark Johnson 06C, North
Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, won his first political race by just three hundred votes. His grandfather inspired him with this FA L L 2 019
advice: “The effort you put into your education really determines what you will be doing for the next forty or fifty years of your life.” Born in Hyderabad, India, and inspired by her own background as the child of South Asian immigrants, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath 04C 12G is the Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Assistant Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature, and History at Emory’s Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. A Syrian Kurdish refugee whose family immigrated just after 9/11, Heval Kelli 15MR graduated from the School of Medicine and gives back as a practicing cardiologist, high school student mentor, and health advocate in immigrant communities. Now a foreign affairs and political journalist for the BBC,
Suzanne Kianpour 07Ox 09C has reported from conflict zones including Beirut and Iran. She is listed in Washington Life magazine as one of D.C.’s most influential leaders under forty.
Sydnee Mack 15L started her
own Atlanta-based practice specializing in sports and entertainment, small business, and trademarks. She’s also the author of 10 Steps to StartUP, a legal and business strategy resource for entrepreneurs. The youngest deputy cabinet secretary in the administration of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, Christian J. Miele 14L manages the legislative portfolio for the department
and leads its policy team.
Samyukta Mullangi 10C
is a physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital and an assistant professor at the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research, studying the role of technology in health care delivery.
A regular keynote speaker at leading conferences, Fahim Naim 05B has empowered dozens of brands to succeed via his consulting business, eShopportunity. “I enjoy the high-risk/high-reward atmosphere,” he says.
Alex Page 08C has a day job
in brand marketing at Warner Media that is complemented by his side gig in the music industry. As a touring and studio musician with Janelle Monae, Page has credits on four albums, an upcoming movie, and multiple Grammy nominations. Crediting his Cuban heritage with his drive for success, Héctor Pagés 06B, a community leader and start-up expert based in Charleston, has spent much of his career in
the social impact space, most recently helping to launch the charitable fundraising platform GoodCoin.
Cofounder and CEO of VinePair, a fast-growing, webbased publication focusing on wine, beer, and spirits, Adam Teeter 05C is “removing the anxiety, pretension, and insider language from the world’s oldest beverages.”
Ateet Patel 04C 09M 17FM is
an interventional cardiologist with WellStar Health System. “Every day is different between monitoring valve work, performing cardiac procedures, or manning shifts in general cardiology,” he says. Because his mentors at Emory steered him toward his specialty, he now mentors Emory medical students through the Emory DOCS program.
After serving in the Mueller investigation, Elizabeth Barchas Prelogar 02C, Fulbright Scholar, Emory University Scholar, Bobby Jones Scholar, Harvard Law School honors graduate, and three-time Miss Idaho is back at the US Department of Justice serving as assistant to the solicitor general.
in media interviews.
As senior communications specialist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Arezoo Risman 08Ox 10C handles major media requests in the press room. She also is cofounder of Helping Kids Heal, a book series created to help children and families experiencing trauma, particularly related to racism.
Ryan Roche 03Ox 05C is
associate director of development for Oxford College of Emory. His positive experience as a student also led him to become an advocate in the Atlanta LGBTQ community.
Rohini Swamy 12C is deputy
A former diplomat with the US Department of State, Christopher Richardson 03C now practices immigration law with the Atlanta-based firm Nelson Mullins. Richardson held posts in Spain, Pakistan, Nicaragua, and Nigeria before leaving the state department amidst widespread criticism of the administration’s international travel ban, which he has objected to
general manager at Godrej Consumer Products Limited, a consumer goods company based in Mumbai that specializes in hair products and soaps. She and her sister, Shivani Swamy 14C, have leadership roles with Livinguard, a company that produces textiles and water filters treated with disinfectant to prevent disease.
WANT MORE?
Onameyore Utuama 10PH is
a family medical practitioner in Mount Dora, Florida. A former fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she earned an MD at Morehouse School of Medicine and is a lead author of the Dyspnea algorithm as part of the Walter Kluwer 5-Minute Clinical Consult, which explains what to do when a patient is experiencing shortness of breath. Award-winning short-form film producer, director, and videographer Jeremy White 07Ox 09C got his big break when he and Austin Reynolds 07Ox 09C earned the top prizes at both Emory’s and the regional level of the 2009 CampusMovieFest competition (also created by Emory alumni).
A leader in the field of regenerative medicine, Christopher J. Williams 12M 16FM is the founder and medical director of Interventional Orthopedics of Atlanta, the first Georgia provider of Regenexx, a stem cell and blood platelet treatment for orthopedic injuries.
Sindy Wilson 10MBA is apply-
ing her Goizueta education in finance at the global consulting firm EY (Ernst and Young). She serves as a mentor for girls hoping to enter business and is a champion for diversity.
Taos Wynn 06Ox 09C founded
the Perfect Love Foundation “to harness the collective power of love to address society’s problems.” Since late 2013, the foundation has championed a range of causes. Wynn was named a 2017 Millennial of the Year and received the Georgia Outstanding Citizen Award, one of the state’s highest civilian honors.
As Emory alumni, these 40 Under Forty have used their Emory experience to forge their own paths. Each one has a singular life, but who first inspired these inspirational people? How did their Emory experience help them succeed in the real world? Learn more about this dynamic and diverse group. We share it all here:
ALUMNI.EMORY.EDU/40MAG FA L L 2 019
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E M ORY E V E RY W H E R E > > ALUMNI PROFI L E
Chef’s Choice IN THE CUTTHROAT RESTAURANT WORLD, WALTER STERLING CAN STAND THE HEAT
meal in thirty seconds over a trash bin, after chef restaurateur Paul Luna hooked him up with Günter Seeger.
Anyone fortunate enough to dine at Seeger’s restaurant at
the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead during its decade-long run probably still dreams about that meal. Seeger earned a Michelin star PERFECT PLATES Chef Walter Sterling (center) with friends at Hospice of the Valley’s sixteenth annual Off the Vine Vintage Wine Auction, held in Paradise Valley in fall 2017.
at the age of twenty-seven at his first restaurant in his native
Germany. In one of his boldest moves, Sterling took a huge pay cut to leave Eclipse to cook for Seeger.
“I made $542 every two weeks, after taxes, and was living
with three guys who also cooked there,” he says of the move. “I call it a paid PhD.”
W
hen Walter Sterling 94BBA told his friends and family in
1996 that he wanted to be a chef, the Food Network was
only a few years old and chefs were not stars.
The then-recent graduate with a double major in Spanish
and international studies had a promising career lined up in
import-export, but office life didn’t appeal. As his classmates
Not racking up school loan debt in culinary school proved
to be a brilliant business decision and established the balance between the creative and financial sides of the industry that
has defined Sterling’s hospitality group in Phoenix. Rather than
leasing a space for his first venture, Ocotillo, in 2015, he worked for others until he saved enough to partner with an architect to buy a lot in an emerging area and build its award-winning
matriculated at law and medical school, Sterling was still chasing Southwestern industrial design themselves. To generate profit the buzz of his parents’ lavish parties at their home in Paradise
without losing quality, they opted for high volume, with two
and white gloves to serve, and everyone would be having such
stereotypes are you either have good food that doesn’t make
Valley, Arizona, during his childhood. “They’d dress us up in suits
hundred seats and a heavy event component. “The industry
a good time. Things would always get a little crazy, and I became money, or a businessperson who only cares about the bottom addicted to the energy,” says Sterling, whose first official hospi-
line and serves chicken Caesar salads,” says Sterling, who
his living expenses his sophomore year. “My parents paid for tu-
ordering ingredients. “If the finances don’t work, nothing works.
ition, but everything else was on me. My friends looked down on me for working in places like Café Diem and Dark Horse Tavern.” After subbing for a short-order cook on a whim, he discov-
oversees finances in addition to cooking, writing menus, and It’s the harsh reality.”
While running two restaurants (Starlite, a refined barbecue
concept, opened last year), with one hundred employees,
ered his passion in quite possibly the city’s smallest commercial Sterling and his wife, Maile, welcomed twins in January 2019. kitchen. That greasy gig begat bigger and bigger positions at
The family splits their time between Phoenix and Venice Beach,
of Atlanta’s dining history. Basil’s Lebanese owners took him in
and will offer authentic Mexican cuisine like scallops from the
Tiburon Grille, Basil’s, and Eclipse di Luna—basically an overview California. Sterling’s next project, Chantico, launches this winter, and introduced him to the restaurant ritual of the family meal be- Sea of Cortez and spaghetti squash flautas as well as Tex-Mex fore service. In stark contrast, he would soon be eating his family classics.—Rebecca Kleinman 93C 48
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PHOTOGR APHY DAVE SEIBERT
tality job was checking IDs at Atlanta’s Neighbor’s Pub to cover
E M ORY E V E RY W H E R E > > ALUM NI PROFI L E
Dogged Dedication After business grad Dan Rubenstein lost his beloved dog, he changed careers to help others KIND TO K9S Dan Rubenstein, with canine friends, says his advice to current students who want to start a business would be that “kindness, fairness, and toughness are not mutually exclusive.”
PHOTOGRAPHY DAN RUBENSTEIN
I
n summer 1999, technology consultant Dan Rubenstein 94BBA hired a dog exercise company to visit his apartment every afternoon while he was at work and take his three-year-old, 172-pound St. Bernard, Sydney, to a dog park. In late July, with the temperature topping one hundred degrees in Chicago, he canceled that day’s appointment. Unbeknownst to him, the company failed to follow his instructions and sent an employee to pick up Sydney. The next morning, Sydney died from catastrophic organ failure due to heatstroke. Devastated but determined, Rubenstein responded to the loss in an extraordinary way. To help ensure nobody else experiences a similar nightmare, he left his lucrative corporate career to work in dog day care. Twenty years later, Rubenstein is the founder and CEO of PUPS Pet Club, overseeing a staff of nearly seventy employees who provide pet care services to thousands of dogs throughout Chicago. Driven by an appetite for competition—Rubenstein has completed more than thirty triathlons and counting—and a passion to honor Sydney’s memory, the entrepreneur is considering national expansion. Here’s a quick Q&A with Rubenstein by Greg Forbes Siegman: GS: How would you describe your experience at Emory? DR: Exactly what I hoped college would be—extremely challenging, but liberating. GS: What led you to choose Emory in the first place? DR: Growing up in Connecticut and New York, the cultural fabric of the East Coast is embedded in me. But I wanted to experience a different part of the country. I strongly believe the only true way to grow as a person is to be open to some-
thing that has the potential to make you uncomfortable. Once I made that decision, choosing Emory was easy—a top school in a great city with a temperate climate and friendly people. GS: Your transition from consulting to pet care reflected that same mindset—walking away from the certain to pursue something new. Did you have any second thoughts? DR: I risked everything—even gave up my apartment and lived at the business to save money—but I had no hesitation. I knew I would succeed, because I had my mind set on it. GS: In the pet care industry, are you still able to use what you learned at Goizueta Business School? DR: Absolutely. I use what I learned about financial modeling on an almost daily basis. GS: Has your participation in triathlons influenced you as a business leader? DR: I’m more disciplined, focused, efficient, and goal-oriented. Triathlons give me real-world practice adapting under pressure. When I train for an Ironman, I prepare for months, but just like in business, unforeseen challenges happen during the race and I must be ready to pivot or adjust. GS: What do you like about dogs? DR: I’ve been enamored with dogs since I was five and my family got a sheepdog named Ruben. I love that dogs live in the moment and communicate very directly. GS: As PUPS Pet Club expands, how do you ensure your employees are driven by the same passion? DR: Keeping a great team in place will be our greatest challenge as we grow. The answer is to have a solid hiring process that identifies high quality candidates, initial and persistent training, competitive compensation, and a great culture that keeps attrition low. FA L L 2 019
EMORY MAGAZINE
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E M ORY E V E RY W H E R E
THE DINNER TABLE Human rights past and present To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, a group of Atlanta and Emory leaders gathered to share dinner and stories, both lessons from the past and visions for the future. We invite you to take a seat.
F
ive years ago this summer, the
National Center for Civil and Human
Rights (NCCHR) opened its doors in
downtown Atlanta. It was designed to
be an engaging and immersive space connecting the American civil rights
movement with ongoing human rights
movements, including those of women
and people identifying as LGBTQ. Emory was involved from the start, with alumni
playing key roles and a range of univer-
Emory Alumni Association.
bers supporting from the wings. Doug
of the NCCHR, and the deep connec-
founding CEO from 2007 through 2015.
we brought some of these key figures
sity administrators and faculty memShipman 95C served as the center’s
Credited with shepherding the project
from idea to reality, Shipman continues
to serve on the NCCHR board and is the
president and CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center, as well as past president of the
To highlight the fifth anniversary
tions between the center and Emory,
together for a conversation. We invited the guests to discuss not just how the
center came to be, but also its present and its future.—Elizabeth Cobb Durel
SEE THE FULL CONVERSATION AND MORE AT EMRY.LINK/DINNERPARTY
Emory was always seen as outside Atlanta, behind the ivy walls of academia. Of course, the hospital was its public door. It’s great to see the university physically try nity. There is unbelievable opportunity to really come into the city now and make a big difference. We have the potential to grow the relationship with the
WE SHOULD BE A DESTINATION FOR ANYONE
university in a way we didn’t even think about in the beginning.
AROUND THE WORLD TO STUDY CIVIL AND
— A. J. ROBINSON 77B,
HUMAN RIGHTS.
PRESIDENT, ATLANTA DOWNTOWN IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT, CO-FOUNDER AND BOARD MEMBER, NCCHR
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— PELLOM MCDANIELS III 06G 07G,
CURATOR, EMORY; EXHIBIT CO-CURATOR, NCCHR
PH O T O G R A PH Y K AY H I N TO N
to be part of the commu-
Digital and social have made people lazy
To take a conversation
about what they can do and what
like this and to lift it
actual advocacy is. Hashtags and marches
up amongst our alumni
are just one small part of a much larger
community, in Atlanta
puzzle in terms of succeeding and getting
and more broadly, to me
social justice.
is putting our words into action.
— JILL SAVITT,
PRESIDENT AND CEO, NCCHR
— JOSH NEWTON, EMORY SENIOR VP, ADVANCEMENT AND ALUMNI ENGAGEMENT; NCCHR BOARD
IT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE INSTITUTIONAL STANCE AND WHAT HAS BEEN INFUSED IN THE INDIVIDUAL. — DOUG SHIPMAN 95C, PRESIDENT, WOODRUFF ARTS CENTER; FOUND� ING CEO, NCCHR
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SPEND THIS GIVING TUESDAY
WITH EMORY. December 3, 2019
momentum.emory.edu/GivingTuesday
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PICK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF Career advancement in an ever-changing marketplace requires innovation, creativity, and thoughtful leadership. Level up your career with Emory Executive Education short courses, certificates, or custom programs designed to fit your needs in today’s evolving business environment.
P H O T O G R A P H Y K AY H I N TO N
#7
National Rank for New Skills & Learning*
#8
National Rank for Program Design*
#8
National Rank for Quality of Teaching*
* Financial Times, 2019
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Innovative partnerships solve our most pressing challenges—and your gift plays a key role in making them possible.
DISCOVER EMORY’S
COLLABORATIONS emry.link/uncommon
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E M ORY E V E RY W H E R E > > CO DA
Flight of Stories
E
ver since I met Garang Buk Buk Piol, I have thought about him every day. When Garang was a boy in South Sudan, he watched armed militants come to his village and set it on fire, killing many of the men who lived there. To escape, he had to walk to Ethiopia, for miles and days and weeks, across punishing terrain, with no expectation of food or water, while others died around him. Then he had to join an army and learn to use a gun. He served as a child soldier for five years. And now he’s here, at Emory, as a graduate student pursuing two master’s degrees. I find that extraordinary, every day. I have been fortunate to meet a lot of extraordinary people while working on Emory Magazine. His Holiness the XIV Dalai Llama, President Jimmy Carter, Paul Simon, and Salman Rushdie spring to mind, as well as personal literary heroes Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, and Barbara Kingsolver. But most of our community members—alumni, faculty, students, and others—are not household names. There was the grad school alumna who led a momentous effort to map American regional English in a multivolume dictionary. And these two dudes who made oil out of algae— algae!—in a garage. There was the attorney who helped bring National Geographic into the digital age, and the immigrant who became a doctor to the poor and disadvantaged. And the preacher who boldly took the pulpit of one of New York City’s most revered and influential churches. 60
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Paige P. Parvin 96G Illustration by Jason Raish
I interviewed a law student who unearthed DNA evidence to free a wrongly incarcerated man, and a guy who was living by himself in rural Ghana, pulling worms out of people and counting them. I spoke with the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange and a professor of Jewish studies who confronted a Holocaust denier—and won—on the world’s big screen. I am inspired by these examples, and so many others, every day. What’s the common denominator? Emory. This place is a magnet for sheer brilliance and drive and altruism. And everyone who sets foot on this campus has a story—the story of what brought them here, what they accomplish while they live and work among us, and what direction they will take when they move on. They’re all stories worthy of telling. Whatever impact they may create will always be, in some small way, part of Emory’s story, too. Speaking of making an impact, have you been hearing about the bees? Bees are, apparently, nearly magical creatures, upon which the future of our planet largely depends. According to the Emory science blog eScienceCommons and biology professor Berry Brosi, who researches both managed and wild bees, honeybee pollination alone is worth more than $15 billion to US agriculture, and “Pollinators, most often honeybees, are responsible for one in every three bites of food we take.” You know, one could imagine Emory Magazine, and the many other excellent sources of the university’s stories across various media channels, as bees . . . thousands of bees, just buzzing along matter-of-factly like they’re supposed to, flying surprising distances on their too-small wings to help disseminate something vital that will help a whole beautiful system continue to grow and blossom and thrive. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, this is my last issue as editor of Emory Magazine. It seemed fitting for this column to appear on the Coda page. It has been a rare privilege and a pure delight to help tell Emory’s stories for almost nineteen years, over more than seventy issues; to see my son graduate this past May; and to play a small part in the vast, ongoing narrative of this magnificent place. I hope you enjoyed this issue. As a proud Emory graduate, I can’t wait to see what the next one holds. Meanwhile, let’s all try and look out for the bees.—P.P.P.
This is our legacy. Susan Schlein 75C and Robert Schlein, parents of Deborah Schlein 13C (not pictured) Susan fell in love with Emory twice, first as an elementary education major in the 70s, then as the proud parent of Deborah Schlein 13C, who earned her Bachelor’s in Middle Eastern and South Asian studies with a minor in Arabic at Emory. Deborah was accepted into the Near Eastern studies program at Princeton as a PhD candidate. The Schleins volunteer for Emory at college fairs, and they mentor incoming freshman from the Houston area. Their planned gift will support scholarships.
“OUR DAUGHTER DEBORAH BLOSSOMED AT EMORY. Because of her amazing experience—the nurturing, caring, guidance she got from faculty and the lifelong friendships she made with her peers in four short years—that’s the reason we are so committed to supporting Emory. We feel it’s important to give other deserving students the same opportunity to flourish. As our children grew up, and we rewrote our wills, we considered where our money can make a difference. Emory was the most logical place for us.”
Have you planned your legacy? giftplanning.emory.edu 404.727.8875
Emory University Office of Alumni and Development Records 1762 Clifton Rd., Suite 1400 Atlanta, Georgia 30322
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Finished with this issue of Emory Magazine? Pass along to a friend or colleague! R E C YC L E M E !
LIFELONG LEARNER Historian Tara Westover discussed her upbringing as a Mormon survivalist in the mountains of Idaho and being uniquely homeschooled in her memoir, Educated, named book of the year by the American Booksellers Association, at the Emory Student Center on September 26, as part of the university’s Common Read “One Book, One Emory” program.