Emory Magazine Winter 2019

WINTER 2019

MAGAZINE

VO L . 9 4 N O. 2

GAME ON AS ATLANTA COUNTS DOWN TO THE SUPER BOWL, EMORY EXPERTS TEAM UP TO JOIN THE DRIVE ( AND YOU THOUGHT WE DIDN’T DO FOOTBALL )

PICK UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF AND TAKE YOUR EDUCATION TO THE NEXT LEVEL. Whether you want to continue your own development through learning new business content or share Goizueta Business School with your team, Emory Executive Education is your connection. We offer non-degree short courses and certificate programs featuring Goizueta’s faculty and cutting-edge thought leadership.

Emory Executive Education is ranked #5 among US business schools for its faculty and quality of teaching.

—Financial Times 2018 Executive Education Custom Programme Rankings

Visit us at worksmarter.org/emorymag for more information.

C O N T E N TS

Emory Magazine Vol. 94 No. 2

COVER

22

Big Game in Town As Atlanta welcomes the NFL’s Super Bowl LIII, Emory’s team of experts—including doctors, scholars, and even a former player—is catching the spirit.

By Scott Henry, Patrick Adams 08MPH, Eric Rangus, and Pellom McDaniels III

34

Secret Weapon How a young Oxford graduate became part of a code-cracking cadre of American women who helped win World War II.

By Al Pearson

40

Smart Growth The Oxford Organic Farm is both a source of fresh, healthy food and an outdoor classroom that serves the campus’s unique approach to education.

By Maria M. Lameiras

40

MORE ONLINE AT EMORY.EDU/MAGAZINE E X PA N D E D F E AT U R E : T H E L E A R N I N G F I E L DS

How Emory students care for Georgia’s migrant workers.

V I D EO : M E E T E M O RY’S S P O RTS D O C S

See interviews with the Emory Healthcare experts who keep the pros up and running.

S P EC I A L F E AT U R E : T H E F LU I S C O M I N G

Are we ready for the next pandemic?

34

C O N T E N TS

20

49

SHORT LIST

10 FACULTY BOOKS

RUBY LAL’S EMPRESS:

THE ASTONISHING

REIGN OF NUR JAHAN 12 STUDENTS

VOLUNTEER INTERPRETATION 14

16

18

Associate Editor Maria M. Lameiras

Interim Director of Creative Services Peta Westmaas

Contributors Patrick Adams 08MPH Rebecca Baggett Carol Clark Gary Goettling Scott Henry April Hunt Pellom McDaniels Al Pearson Eric Rangus Presley West 20C Kimber Williams

4 RESEARCH FUNDING

HITS RECORD HIGH 6

Copy Editor Jane Howell

Executive Director of Communication Susan Carini 04G

46

POINTS OF INTEREST

Editor Paige P. Parvin 96G

Design Mike Nelson, Times 3 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 EVERYWHERE

OFFICE HOURS

PLEASURE IN OTHERS’ PAIN DOOLEY NOTED

VALDOSTA ROOTS

45

ALUMNI NEWS

46

ROWING RECORD

49

AMY NELSON 02C

50

ALUMNI INK

ALUMNI PROFILE

IN CLASS

60

FOOD AS ART

20 RESEARCH

NIH ALL OF US STUDY

CODA

TIME ON THE CLOCK

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 Paige Parvin (address above).

No. 19-EU-EMAG-0046 ©2018, a publication of the Division 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 illustration by Stephen Nowland, Emory Photo Video

2

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

PPHHOOTTOOGGRRAAPPHHYYSNTA EM P HEESN N O W L A N D

L E T T E RS

T H E B I G P I CT U R E Serious Fan Oxford’s Erin Tarver studies the impact of sports fandom on athletes and culture. Story on page 30.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

3

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

VALUE ADDED Lifesaving breakthroughs may require years of work, but in the shorter term, funded university research serves as a catalyst for economic growth that surpasses the initial investment. Research dollars help Emory and Georgia attract a highly skilled workforce, entice top professors and students, create jobs, increase clinical trials, and advance start-up projects that bring additional funding from private, government, and industry sources.

Research Results

E

mory received $734 million in external research funding in fiscal year 2018, the most ever for the university.

“At Emory, striving for excellence means staying engaged with the challenges facing our world,” says President Claire E. Sterk.

“It means bringing together the most brilliant and creative minds to collaborate in ways that only we can, serving as an incubator for research and a driver for compassionate innovation.”

Emory’s external research funding for this year represents a 17 percent increase from $628 million in fiscal year 2017. During the past ten years, research funding has increased by nearly 52 percent.

“This significant increase, following a rising trajectory over the past decade, reflects the dedication and expertise of our faculty,” says Deborah W. Bruner, senior vice president for research. “Emory is increasingly recognized as one of the nation’s leading research institutions, due to advances by our scientists fueled by a passion for discovery and collaboration.”

4

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

The funded projects include understanding and preventing the deaths of young children in developing countries; uniting Georgia scientists to translate research results into better outcomes for patients; and creating new ways to apply chemistry that could lead to breakthroughs across sectors.

For the first time, the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance Network (CHAMPS) is making available cause-of-death data from children under the age of five in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where infant and childhood mortality are exceptionally high.

Since 2015, CHAMPS, with the Emory Global Health Institute as lead partner, has been focused on preventing childhood mortality in developing countries with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Through an initial $75 million from the Gates Foundation, CHAMPS has partnered with governments and national public health institutes on a long-term approach to information management, laboratory infrastructure, and workforce capacity. CHAMPS recently was granted an additional $25 million by the Gates Foundation.

As the CHAMPS network gathers and shares specific cause-of-death data, researchers and child health programs

P H O T O G R A P H Y A N N WAT S O N

RECORD FUNDING FUELS COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION, WITH IMPACT AROUND THE WORLD

RANK AND FILE

” EMORY IS INCREASINGLY RECOGNIZED AS ONE OF THE NATION’S LEADING RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS, DUE TO ADVANCES

BY OUR SCIENTISTS FUELED BY A PASSION FOR DISCOVERY AND COLLABORATION. DEBORAH W. BRUNER, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH

P H O T O G R A P H Y K AY H I N TO N

will be able to use it to develop effective interventions.

Closer to home, after a decade of collaboration among Atlanta partners Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Georgia Tech, the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute expanded to include the University of Georgia and received a new name: the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (Georgia CTSA).

In the process, the Emory-led alliance received a new five-year, $51 million CTSA award from the National Institutes of Health. The Georgia CTSA is part of a national network of more than fifty academic medical centers across the country working to ensure innovative and effective treatments are available to more patients by improving the translational research process.

And the National Science Foundation awarded another $20 million to Emory’s Center for Selective C-H Functionalization to fund the next phase of a global effort to revolutionize the field of organic synthesis.

“Our center is at the forefront of a major shift in the way that we do chemistry,” says Huw Davies, professor of chemistry at Emory and the director of the Center for Selective C-H Functionalization. “This shift holds great promise for creating new pathways for drug discovery and the production of new materials, to benefit everything from agriculture to electronics.”

US NEWS PUTS EMORY AT NO. 21 Emory has been ranked No. 21 among the nation’s top universities in the 2019 Best Colleges guidebook from US News & World Report.

Emory was listed as No. 19 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 21 percent of its undergraduates receiving need-based Pell Grants, and among schools with the largest percentage of international undergraduates at 16 percent.

Goizueta Business School, which is ranked separately from the university’s main undergraduate program based on a peer survey of deans and senior faculty, 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).

A D D F U E L TO T H E F I R E Gifts to Emory College of Arts and Sciences support research projects that lead to brighter futures.

To learn more, visit emory.edu/home/giving/where-to-give/.html

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

5

SHORT LIST

6

EMORY MAGAZINE

Business-Like Linda McCauley, dean of Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, was named among the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 2018 Women Who Mean Business.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle recognized McCauley and 20 other Atlanta-area women for making significant strides in their careers, having an impact in their communities, and paving the way for generations to come.

New Digs The Morgens West Foundation Galleries of Ancient Near Eastern Art at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum opened in November after a nine-month renovation. A transformative gift from Sally and Jim Morgens, longtime friends of the museum, provided the opportunity for a new architectural design and curatorial vision, which have led to the integration of technology in the galleries as well as new opportunities for enhanced viewership and learning.

WINTER 2019

New Directions Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library welcomed Jennifer Gunter King as its new director in October.

King was previously the director of the Library and Knowledge Commons at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Prior to joining Hampshire, King was director of Archives and Special Collections at Mount Holyoke College, where she initiated programs including an online digital archive, electronic records archiving, and campuswide exhibitions and programming. She previously held positions in special collections at Virginia Tech University Libraries and the University of Virginia.

Open Books Two Emory College of Arts and Sciences professors—Carol Anderson (left), Charles Howard Candler Professor and chair of African American Studies, and Tayari Jones (right), professor of English and creative writing— have earned a spot on this year’s longlists for the 2018 National Book Awards, according to an announcement by the National Book Foundation.

Totaling Tuition Emory has launched a new, easy-to-use college cost estimator, called MyinTuition, on its office of financial aid and undergraduate admission websites.

The online tool provides prospective students and their families a faster, easier way to estimate the cost of attending Emory College or Oxford College.

MyinTuition, developed by an economist at Wellesley College, asks users six to 12 basic financial questions and provides a personalized estimate of what it would cost an individual to attend that particular college.

Emory joins more than 30 schools already using the tool.

P H O T O G R A P H Y WAT E R H U B : B R YA N M E LT Z ; P E T R I D I S H E S A N D A N D E R S O N : S T E P H E N N O W L A N D ; B OY A N D C A L C U L ATO R : I S TO C K ; A L L OT H E R S : S U B M I T T E D B Y S U B J E C T

Kudos Keep Flowing Emory has received a 2018 Campus Sustainability Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

The university was recognized for its innovative teaching and student docent programs related to the WaterHub, which uses engineered processes that emulate natural ecological systems to reclaim wastewater for heating and cooling buildings and flushing toilets.

The WaterHub, which recently celebrated an impressive milestone—recycling 200 million gallons of water—serves as a living laboratory and a platform for hands-on research.

Those Who Can Emory has been ranked among the top universities of its size contributing the greatest number of graduating seniors to the 2018 Teach For America corps. Emory is ranked No. 3 nationally among medium-sized schools, with 28 graduates joining Teach for America this year.

Teach for America recruits outstanding graduates to commit to teach in high-need public schools. They represent more than 680 colleges and universities. Emory has also been recognized as a top producer nationally of students and recent alumni who receive US Fulbright awards and who volunteer for the Peace Corps.

Undergraduate Research The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.47 million grant to Emory College biologists Christopher Beck and Nicole Gerardo and Morehouse College professors Larry Blumer and Sinead Younge to expand one of Emory’s signature undergraduate research experiences to colleges across the country. The five-year grant for the Bean Beetle Microbiome Project provides a chance to examine how autonomy in deciding research questions helps students learn, while also generating new data for the biologists to consider in their own research.

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

PICKING UP THE PIECES THE FIRST CURATOR OF AFRICAN AMERICAN COLLECTIONS

I

n his twenty-one years at Emory, Randall K. Burkett has been a driving force in acquiring African American collections of rare books, manuscripts, serials, photographs, and print ephemera for the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

“We have one of the most extensive archives of African American history and culture among major research universities,” Burkett says. “I’ve been fortunate to build relationships with

THE ENVELOPES, PLEASE

P H O T O G R A P H Y A N N WAT S O N

Beckett letters now open

Emory has debuted an open-access website listing the archival descriptions and locations of the letters of the Irish Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett.

Developed in collaboration with more than twenty-five American literary archives, the Location Register of the Letters of Samuel Beckett in American Public Archives was established to collect, consult, and transcribe all extant letters by Beckett, and to publish the selected edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett in four volumes (Cambridge University Press, 2009–2016).

In 1985, Beckett authorized founding

wonderful people— authors, artists, leaders in their fields, and families—who were looking to place their papers with a library that would preserve them and open them to academic researchRandall Burkett ers and the public. And that place is the Rose Library at Emory.”

Burkett was hired in 1997 as Emory’s first curator for African American collections. “Randall Burkett is the consummate curator—not only in his own collecting, but also in amassing Emory’s capstone collection of black print culture, a field he helped pioneer,” says Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and University Distinguished Professor.

Burkett played a key role in securing many important acquisitions, including

editor Martha Dow Fehsenfeld to publish his correspondence, and Emory’s Lois More Overbeck also was asked to join the project. From 1985 until his death in 1989, Beckett himself helped to facilitate their research through access and interviews.

In 1990, the effort became affiliated with Emory’s Laney Graduate School. ”For Samuel Beckett, letters were first of all a human exchange: they were a means of keeping in touch, of spanning distance and time,” says Overbeck, the project’s managing editor. “Both the tempo and immediacy of contemporary communication suggest that Beckett’s letters may be among the last great literary correspondences.”

The Location Register is the first step toward preserving the cumulative knowledge of this unique archive.

the papers of Alice Walker and Pearl Cleage, historian Carter G. Woodson, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the extraordinary gift

by Camille Billops and James Hatch of their priceless collection of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and oral histories documenting the African American experience that would otherwise be lost to history.

The Rose Library’s African American collections focus on six principal collecting areas: civil rights movements, black print culture, blacks and the left, African American literature and the arts, expatriate literary and culture figures, and African Americans and sports.

The exhibit Building Emory’s African American Collections: Highlights from the Curatorial Career of Randall K. Burkett, featuring treasures from those collections and Burkett’s stories, is on view at the Woodruff Library through February 3.

“We are honored to be a part of this special project to enhance widespread access,” says University Librarian Yolanda Cooper. “We have no doubt that this work will ensure the introduction of Beckett’s work to future generations of readers and scholars.”

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

7

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

Dreams Get Real A LANDMARK GATHERING PUTS ‘THE MOST DIVERSE SQUARE MILE IN AMERICA’ ON THE MAP, FINDING NEW ROUTES FOR THOSE WHO NEED HELP

HEALTH AND JUSTICE FOR ALL Emory cardiology fellow Heval Kelli (above) lived in the Clarkston refugee community with his family when they came to the US after 9/11. Now a physician and volunteer with the Clarkston Community Health Clinic, he helps others get access to needed services.

I

n November, more than 250 members of the Clarkston refugee and immigrant communities, Emory and Georgia State University (GSU) researchers and volunteers, and community organization representatives met at GSU’s Clarkston campus to learn from each other and lay a foundation for future engagement.

The Clarkston Summit was the first major effort of the recently established Refugee and Immigrant Health and Wellness Alliance (RIHWA)—a partnership among the Emory Global Health Institute, GSU, Kaiser Permanente of Georgia, the DeKalb County Board of Health, numerous refugee resettlement agencies, and other organizations working with refugees and immigrants.

8

EMORY MAGAZINE

Heval Mohamed Kelli 15MR, a Kurdish refugee from Syria who came to Clarkston after 9/11 and is now a cardiology fellow at Emory, first envisioned the summit in 2016 with Mary Helen O’Connor, director of the Center for Community Engagement at GSU’s Perimeter College.

“There are so many great things going on to help the refugee and immigrant communities, but people are not talking to each other. Some people are doing the same things in different pockets of the community,” says Kelli.

“This was one of the first events of its kind to bring everyone together to communicate with each other and collaborate.”

WINTER 2019

Coordinating efforts in the community—described as the most diverse square mile in America—could lead to more successful applications for grants and other funding to support the variety of services offered to area residents, many of whom are underserved or live in poverty.

Thanks to the Clarkston Summit, the RIHWA now has concrete data on the needs of the community and will focus their efforts on the most pressing, applying for appropriate grants and finding the right partners to tackle those needs, Kelli says.

He points to three fundamental areas where the community should concentrate efforts.

“Number one is providing a good education, because without a good education you can’t advance in this country,” Kelli says. “Number two is health care.

If you are not a healthy person, you can’t advocate for yourself. There is no social justice without health justice.

“The last thing is that all physicians should use their position to be involved in social advocacy beyond health care. It is imperative for physicians in the community to really try to use their power to advance the community for the benefit of our patients.”—Rebecca Baggett

P H O T O G R A P H Y D OT PA U L

DREAM TEAM Leaders of the new Refugee and Immigrant Health and Wellness Alliance, the planners of the first Clarkston Summit, were rewarded with an unexpected turnout of more than 250 community members as well as representatives of related organizations.

EMORY IN THE NEWS TALKING BACK TO BIGOTRY

After the shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, discussion turned to the growing antisemitism in America and worldwide.

Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies, urged the public to speak up when they hear bigotry in their everyday lives.

“Silence in the face of bigotry is acquiescence,” Lipstadt said during an interview with NPR. She was also interviewed by, or wrote pieces for, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and TIME.

HOT STUFF

Microwavable instant soup and noodle products cause nearly 10,000 scald burns

each year—nearly one out of every five such burns that send children to emergency rooms each year, according to new Emory research presented at an American Academy of Pediatrics conference. The study was covered by Today, CNN, Fox News, U.S. News & World Report, Popular Science, and Buzzfeed.

TIMELY TOPIC

Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies, this fall released her newest book, One Person, No Vote, which explores the history of voter suppression in America. It sparked widespread media coverage.

Anderson bantered with Trevor Noah on The Daily

GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE

PHOTOG R APHY SU B M IT TED BY SU BJ ECT

PUBLIC TRANSIT GETS TRACTION

T

Show and was interviewed by the New York Times, PBS NewsHour, CNN, the Atlantic, MSNBC, and NBC News. The book has received several recognitions and awards including inclusion on the National Book Award longlist and Washington Post’s Best Books of 2018 list.

THE POTATO GENE?

Potatoes, native to South America, became an agricultural crop thousands of years ago in the Andean highlands of Peru. The potato may have altered the genomes of the Andeans who made it a staple of their diet. DNA analyses from Emory geneticist John Lindo show that ancient populations of the Peruvian highlands adapted to the introduction of agriculture

he MARTA board of directors voted in October to approve $2.7 billion in allotments under the More MARTA program, including $350 million slated for the Clifton Corridor Transit Initiative, a four-mile light-rail line that would provide commuting options, decrease traffic congestion, and improve sustainability in the Emory area.

“MARTA and the city of Atlanta made a historic commitment to public transportation and to the future of our community.

The entire region is one step closer to a smart, sustainable, and efficient transit network that connects communities as never before,” says Presi-

and an extreme, high-altitude environment in ways distinct from other global populations. The research was covered by the New York Times, National Geographic, and Science.

RAUCOUS MIDTERMS

Voter turnout for the 2018 midterm elections was the highest in more than 100 years. Emory political experts were on hand to guide journalists and their readers through the chaos, including interviews in more than 100 outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Washington Post, the New Yorker, Associated Press, NPR, NBC News, USA Today, Bloomberg, CNN, US News & World Report, and PBS NewsHour.

dent Claire E. Sterk. “Emory University and Emory Healthcare look forward to joining with businesses, government entities, and others who recognize the importance of this public transit opportunity and are committed to broad partnership to make it a reality.”

The Clifton Road corridor serves more than forty thousand employees, fifteen thousand students, and 2 million patient visits per year. Nearly fifty thousand cars pass through each day, according to the Clifton Corridor Transportation Management Association.

The light-rail project would help ease traffic congestion and provide transit access for thousands of workers who cannot easily reach Emory, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and the VA. It would also make it easier for students and faculty to travel to Atlanta.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

9

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

FAC U LT Y BO O KS

Natural-Born Leader NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MUSLIM QUEEN WITH DEAD AIM, A BIG ATTITUDE, AND THE WILL TO RULE

10

EMORY MAGAZINE

“

been assailed by an attacking tiger for months. Jahangir could not intervene, having promised Allah when he turned fifty that he would not injure any living being.

That vow did not constrain his queen, however, and as Lal describes it, “The tiger emerged from the trees. Nur lifted her musket, aimed between the animal’s eyes, and pulled the trigger. Despite the swaying of her elephant, one shot was enough; the tiger fell to the ground, killed instantly.”

And that is just the opening entry in a list of extraordinary attributes, for Nur served as co-sovereign—a position never held by a woman. For fifteen years, until the time of her husband’s death.

Nur ruled alongside him, issuing her own imperial orders and, says Lal, “successfully navigating the labyrinth of feudal courtly politics and the male-centered culture of the Mughal world.”

Eventually, Jahangir was considered by a contemporary historian as king “only in name.” A generation earlier, Jahangir’s father had ordered all royal

WINTER 2019

The tiger emerged from the trees.

Nur lifted her musket, aimed between the animal’s eyes, and pulled the trigger.

PHOTOGR APHY CO U RTESY RU BY L AL

D

on’t let the image of Nur Jahan on the cover of her latest biography fool you.

On it, she delicately holds a tiny tea cup— perhaps, one might think, an all-too-common way to pass the time for a queen serving alongside a more-powerful husband.

But gender boxes don’t fit Nur, as we learn from the first pages of Ruby Lal’s Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan.

Lal, professor of South Asian studies, is an expert in feminist history and theory. The way she sets the stage for Nur is part and parcel of why audiences for Empress have far exceeded what might be expected for a biography of a seventeenth-century Muslim queen.

Nur was the twentieth wife of Jahangir, the fourth of the Mughal emperors of India—a Muslim dynasty established by invasion in the sixteenth century. Though a late addition to the ranks, Nur, by all accounts, was Jahangir’s favorite.

Says Lal, “Beautiful and accomplished, Nur Jahan was the daughter of nobles who’d fled persecution in Persia.

She was also the widow of a court official implicated in the plot against Jahangir, but that didn’t stop the emperor from falling hard for her. She was thirty-four when they married, nearly middle-aged in the Mughal world.”

Not to mention an expert markswoman. Lal describes a royal trip to the people of Mathura, who were anxious for the arrival of the emperor, having

women—wives, daughters, and concubines—to be hidden behind harem walls.

Nur, however, broke that mold by virtue of being “on view in the most male and public of places. A new kind of power was on display.”

Lal first heard about Nur from her mother, who, she notes, “had a bagful of wondrous tales for my two younger sisters and me.” She describes her father as often eavesdropping on the storytelling from behind a newspaper. But hiding didn’t spare him.

Lal remembers turning to him and saying, “I am Nur Jahan. You are Jahangir.”

Despite the comic mileage that bold statement earned in family lore, it rang true: Lal became a feminist historian.

The author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World and Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness, Lal was a natural for Nur’s biography.

In the process, she discovered that although South Asians know many legends about Nur and recite them with pride, “the emphasis on her romance with Jahangir truncates her biography in a way that diminishes her. In the popular imagination, Nur’s story seems to stop at the very moment when her life’s best work began.”

Lal turns that tide by examining Nur’s accomplishments—among them, leading imperial troops to rescue her husband when he was taken prisoner by a rebellious nobleman in 1626. Says Lal, “It would be another 350 years, when Indira Gandhi became India’s first female prime minister, before another woman ascended to such heights in Indian statecraft.”

—Susan Carini 04G

DID YOU SAY ‘SQUIRREL’?

When a dog hears the word, does it actually picture a small, bushy-tailed rodent in its mind?

Last fall, Frontiers in Neuroscience published one of the first studies using brain imaging to probe how our canine companions process words they have been taught to associate with objects.

The results of the study by Emory scientists suggest that dogs have at least a rudimentary neural representation of meaning for words they have been taught, differentiating words they have heard before from those they have not.

P H O T O G R A P H Y D O G I N F M R I : G R E G O R Y B E R N S ; W H I S P E R E R : I S TO C K

HE’S ALL EARS Eddie, one of the dogs that participated in the study, poses in the fMRI scanner with two of the toys used in the experiments, “Monkey” and “Piggy.”

“Many dog owners think that their dogs know what some words mean, but there really isn’t much scientific evidence to support that,” says Ashley Prichard, a PhD candidate in Emory’s Department of Psychology and first author of the study. “We wanted to get data from the dogs themselves—not just owner reports.”

“We know that dogs have the capacity to process at least some aspects of human language since they can learn to follow verbal commands,” adds Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns, senior author of the study. “Previous research, however, suggests dogs may rely on many other cues to follow a verbal

command, such as gaze, gestures, and even emotional expressions.”

Berns is founder of the Dog Project, which is researching evolutionary questions surrounding man’s best and oldest friend. The project was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. Studies by the Dog Project have furthered understanding of dogs’ neural response to expected reward, identified specialized areas in the dog brain for processing faces, demonstrated olfactory responses to human and dog odors, and linked prefrontal function to inhibitory control.

For the current study, twelve dogs of varying breeds were trained for months by their owners to retrieve two different objects based on the objects’ names.

Each dog’s pair of objects consisted of one with a soft texture, such as a stuffed animal, and another of a different texture, such as rubber, to facilitate discrimination. Training consisted of instructing the dogs to fetch one of the objects and then rewarding them with food or praise. Training was considered complete when a dog showed that it could discriminate between the two objects by consistently fetching the one requested by the owner when presented with both of the objects.

During one experiment, the trained dog lay in the fMRI scanner while the dog’s owner stood directly in front of the dog at the opening of the machine and said the names of the dog’s toys at set intervals, then showed the dog the corresponding toys.

Eddie, a golden retriever-Labrador mix, for instance, heard his owner say the words “piggy” or “monkey,” and then his owner held up the matching toy. As a control, the owner then spoke gibberish words, such as “bobbu” and “bodmick,” then held up novel objects like a hat or a doll.

The results showed greater activation in auditory regions of the brain to the novel pseudowords relative to the trained words.

“We expected to see that dogs neurally discriminate between words that they know and words that they don’t,” Prichard says. “What’s surprising is that the result is opposite to that of research on humans—people typically show greater neural activation for known words than novel words.”

The researchers hypothesize that the dogs may show greater neural activation to a novel word because they sense their owners want them to understand what they are saying. “Dogs ultimately want to please their owners, and perhaps also receive praise or food,” Berns says. “They may have varying capacity and motivation for learning and understanding human words, but they appear to have a neural representation for the meaning of words they have been taught, beyond just a low-level Pavlovian response.”—Carol Clark

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

1 1

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

ST U D E N T L I F E

USING THEIR WORDS STUDENT VOLUNTEERS SERVE AS MUCH-NEEDED INTERPRETERS AT ATLANTA MEDICAL CLINICS

12

EMORY MAGAZINE

population are Spanish speakers, about sixty percent,” says Gonzalez-Valero.

Student interesting in joining EUVMIS apply in the fall and are screened by the student executive committee before being chosen for the program. Unlike some volunteer groups, these students commit to a forty-hour training program, held for eight hours a day on five consecutive Saturdays, to certify them as medical interpreters.

The majority of the cost for the program is covered by a three-year seed grant from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Health Affairs in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center and funding from the anthropology department’s Global Health, Culture, and Society program, but students are required to make a $200 investment toward the training and course materials.

“We do our best to search for students who are driven and committed to the program. Many of our students are premed, but when reading the applications you can very clearly see whether the student wants to join the group for their resume or for personal reasons,” Gonzalez-Valero says. “The people who really have a connection to what we are doing tend to stick with it.

We tell our new recruits that it is like adding another class to their schedule.

There’s a lot of studying and a lot of commitment required.”

Early on a fall Saturday, Cesar Aguilar 19C arrived at the Good Samaritan Health Clinic in Atlanta, serving as both an interpreter and clinic coordinator, keeping the Emory School of Medicine students who staff the clinic updated on

WINTER 2019

ESCUCHA, POR FAVOR Student interpreter Cesar Aguilar (above) grew up translating for his parents; now he applies that skill in free medical clinics as part of a student-run volunteer organization.

when other interpreters would arrive and assisting patients.

His first client is a thirty-nine-yearold landscaper who has come in for headaches and throat pain. The man is visibly relieved when he realizes Aguilar is there to help him communicate with the doctors.

Carefully Aguilar listens to the doctors’ questions and relates them to the patient, then translates the answers back to the doctors. Although the process slows the examination a little, doctors are able to gather important details the patient shares with Aguilar, either in direct responses to their questions or in asides the patient shares with the interpreter.

In another room, a woman in her sixties needs her diabetes medication refilled, then relates that she works twelve-hour days cooking in a restaurant kitchen and that she has pain in her left shoulder that is preventing her from lifting her arm above shoulder level.

In rapid-fire Spanish she describes

P H O T O G R A P H Y A N N WAT S O N

S

ince he was a small child, Angel Gonzalez-Valero 19C has understood how important it is to understand.

A first-generation American born in Austin, Texas, Gonzalez-Valero served as an interpreter for his parents, immigrants from Mexico, whenever they needed him to bridge the gap between their native languages.

“I always interpreted for them in every situation, from getting groceries to going to the hospital,” says GonzalezValero, a senior chemistry major who is serving his third year as president of the student-run Emory University Volunteer Medical Interpretation Services (EUVMIS).

Established in 2013 by medical and undergraduate students, EUVMIS is one of the first service-learning programs in the country to train graduate and undergraduate students to serve as medical interpreters at free clinics in Atlanta’s underserved communities, many of them predominately made up of new Americans and immigrants.

“Some of the most profound experiences for me have been when I see my parents in the patients I am representing,” Gonzalez-Valero says. “It makes me think that, no matter the situation of the patient themselves or the severity of the diagnosis, those people deserve someone who will help them feel more at ease.”

Currently the program has nine interpreters who are fluent in Spanish, and the group hopes to expand to provide Portuguese translation with its incoming class of ten student volunteers.

“In the Atlanta metro area, the vast majority of the low English proficiency

In the metro Atlanta area, the vast majority of the low-English proficiency population are Spanish speakers.

the pain, demonstrating by lifting and rotating her arm, grimacing when the pain prevents normal movement. Despite her pain, she smiles and laughs with Aguilar, cracking jokes in Spanish that set the young man chuckling. He relays them to the medical team, who smile and laugh with her, keeping her at ease.

“When you see a patient or their family members and they realize you speak Spanish, they get a smile on their faces because they know their voices are finally going to be heard and they will get the appropriate health care,” says Aguilar, who has been an interpreter since his sophomore year. Like Gonzalez-Valero, Aguilar often translated for his parents, who are originally from Mexico and El Salvador, while growing up in California.

He wants to go to medical school, so the experience is helping him learn the ropes early, but his interest goes beyond the academic.

“I see common threads with all of the patients. There is a serious problem with Spanish-speaking populations in terms of diet, incidence of cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure,” he says. “This is something we need to help educate people about.”—Maria M. Lameiras

GROUP EFFORT The Emory University Volunteer Medical Interpretation Services organization was formed by a group of students (above) to fill a critical need in the Atlanta area, where the number of non-English speakers has increased rapidly in recent years.

NO WORDS Aguilar, a wisecracking patient, and an Emory medical student are reminded that laughter is the same in any language.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

1 3

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

Philippe Rochat, Scott Lilienfeld, and Shensheng Wang on

Schadenfreude

5

THINGS TO KNOW

ONLY HUMAN. The Emory authors suggest that schadenfreude has three different but interrelated subforms— aggression, rivalry, and justice—which have distinct developmental origins and personality correlates. They also single out a commonality: “Dehumanization appears to be at the core of schadenfreude,” says Shensheng Wang, a PhD candidate in psychology at Emory and first author of the paper. “The scenarios that elicit schadenfreude, such as intergroup conflicts, tend to also promote dehumanization.”

RED FLAGS. “The propensity to experience schadenfreude 14

EMORY MAGAZINE

isn’t entirely unique, but it overlaps substantially with other ‘dark’ personality traits, such as sadism, narcissism, and psychopathy,” Lilienfeld says. “Moreover, different subforms of schadenfreude may relate somewhat differently to these often malevolent traits.”

Ordinary people may temporarily lose empathy, but those with darker traits are either less able or less motivated to put themselves in the shoes of others.

THE OTHER SIDE. Research suggests that infants as young as eight months demonstrate a sophisticated sense of social justice.

In experiments, they showed a preference for puppets who assisted a helpful puppet, and who punished puppets WINTER 2019

Schadenfreude—the sense of pleasure people derive from the misfortune of others—is a familiar feeling to many, yet it’s poorly understood.

The complex emotion may provide a valuable window

into the darker side of humanity, according to a recent review article in New Ideas in Psychology by Emory psychologists including Philippe Rochat, who studies infant and child development, and Scott Lilienfeld, whose research focuses on personality and personality disorders.

One problem with studying the phenomenon is the lack of an agreed definition of schadenfreude, which literally means “harm joy” in German. Since ancient times, some scholars have condemned schadenfreude as malicious, while others have perceived it as morally neutral or even virtuous.

“Schadenfreude is an uncanny emotion that is difficult to assimilate,” Rochat says. “It’s kind of a warm-cold experience that is associated with a sense of guilt. It can make you feel odd to experience pleasure when hearing about bad things happening to someone else.”

that had exhibited antisocial behavior. By nine months, they prefer puppets who punish others who are unlike themselves. “When you think of normal child development, you think of children becoming good-natured and sociable,” Rochat says. “But there’s a dark side to becoming socialized. You create friends and other in-groups to the exclusion of others.”

OUT OF SPITE. Spiteful rivalry appears by at least age five or six, when research has shown that children will sometimes opt to maximize their gain over another child, even if they have to sacrifice a resource to do so. By the time they reach adulthood, many people have learned to hide any tendencies toward

making a sacrifice just for spite, but they may be more open about making sacrifices that are considered pro-social.

ELUSIVE EMPATHY. Concerns of self-evaluation, social identity, and justice are the three motivators that drive people toward schadenfreude. What pulls people away is the ability to feel empathy for others and to perceive them as fully human. “We all experience schadenfreude, but we don’t like to think about it too much because it shows how ambivalent we can be to our fellow humans,” Rochat says.

“Schadenfreude points to our ingrained concerns, and it’s important to study it in a systematic way if we want to understand human nature.”

I L L U S T R AT I O N M AT T G R O E N I N G

O F F I C E H O U RS

Historic Perspective S P OT L I G H T

PHOTOGRAPHY STEPHEN NOWL AND

Y

KYLIE SMITH IS AN IN-HOUSE NURSING HISTORIAN

ou might say that Kylie Smith, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing and the Humanities, is something of an outsider.

What Smith brings to the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing is a perspective largely absent from broader health care curricula: One that considers the profession’s past, its origins and influences, and its generally underappreciated role in American health care.

“It’s important for nurses, and especially nursing leaders, to know where they came from,” says Smith, a native of Australia, where she earned a PhD in history before relocating to the US on a fellowship with the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. “They need to understand how and why their profession developed as it did.”

Nursing History for Contemporary Role Development, a collection of essays

by Sandra Lewenson and Annemarie McAllister, edited by Smith, chronicles the evolution of nursing from the nineteenth century to the present— examining, among other things, nurses’ enduring role as a vanguard force for social justice. “Nursing students today want to know how they can do more,” says Smith. “So we tried, with this book, to show them that nurses have always been agents of social change—that more than being at the bedside, they’ve been, and continue to be, social activists, patient advocates, and innovators.”

Smith’s speciality is the history of psychiatric nursing. Her research focuses on the development of mental health nursing in the US from 1945 to 1980, and explores how American nurses negotiated competing ideas about mental health in what she calls an “anxiety-riddled age.” Indeed, as veterans of World War II struggled to reintegrate into civil society, psychiatry in the US exploded,

and the newly established National Institute of Mental Health saw nurses as key to providing the complicated care vets needed.

One of the driving forces behind that development was Hildegard Peplau, an American nursing educator whose wartime experience at a field hospital in the UK informed her pioneering scholarship.

After helping to reshape the nation’s mental health care system through passage of the National Mental Health Act of 1946, Peplau published her seminal text, Interpersonal Relations in Nursing, credited with revolutionizing the field.

“The history of psychiatry is dominated by doctors and these terrible images of nurses, like Nurse Ratched,” says Smith, referring to the antagonist

of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel.

Smith recounts an episode at a medical conference when Peplau stood up and declared that it was unethical for nurses to be involved in electroconvulsive therapy. A physician stood up after her and said, “What do you know, you’re just a nurse!”

“Peplau tried to encourage nurses to do more and be more, and psych nurses today really do see that relationship between themselves and their patients as the core of their practice—not just dispensing drugs,” says Smith, who has extensively researched Peplau’s life and work. “They call it the ‘therapeutic use of self,’ this idea that you, the nurse, are the treatment.”

“

It’s important for nurses, and especially nursing leaders, to know where they came from.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

1 5

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

D O O L E Y N OT E D

EXPLORING THE UNIVERSITY’S DEEP SOUTH ROOTS

THE OLD OAK TREE The “graduation tree” has stood on the Valdosta campus for more than a century.

16

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

A

PHOTOGRAPHY SUBMIT TED

Emory at Valdosta

few sprigs of Emory’s history in south Georgia continue to grow in Valdosta, a city with just over fifty thousand residents about twenty minutes from the GeorgiaFlorida line.

Built in the late 1920s, Emory Junior College at Valdosta was a men’s college until 1953, offering young men the opportunity to pursue a two-year degree for more than three decades aside from a brief closure during World War II. Judge Gus Elliott 52EJCV 54C has fond memories of his experience at Emory Junior College at Valdosta.

“Of all the schools I attended, Emory Junior College was by far the greatest and most meaningful of my education experiences,” he says.

The campus has long since been renovated and absorbed into what is now Valdosta State University, but Emory planted lasting roots. Around the time of the school’s founding, two live oak trees were planted on the campus, and they have been growing for almost a century.

Recently those trees, dubbed Emory at Valdosta East and Emory at Valdosta West, were inducted into the Live Oak Society, an association dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of the live oak tree. Named to honor the Emory Junior College at Valdosta legacy, the two live oaks, or Quercus Virginiana, are respectively nine and more than seven feet in girth. They have lived through one world war, sixteen United States presidents, ten Emory University presidents, ten Valdosta State University presidents, and three of the four remakes of A Star is Born.

Emory at Valdosta East and Emory at Valdosta West live on the Valdosta State University campus, right outside of Pound Hall, one of the original buildings erected for Emory Junior College at Valdosta. Offering not only cool shade during a southern summer, the two also provide another lasting reminder of Emory’s history in Georgia.—Sarah I. Kelley 16Ox 18C

OLD MADE NEW PHI GAMMA HALL RESTORATION

P H O T O G R A P H Y B E C K Y S T E I N A N D R O B B H E L F R I C K ; I L L U S T R AT I O N I S TO C K

I

n the 167 years since it was built as a space for debate-society meetings, Phi Gamma Hall has taken on many looks and played many roles in the history of Emory. Now, after extensive renovation, the elegantly plain building anchoring the northwest corner of the Oxford College Quad has still another incarnation, this time as a space dedicated to academic and public events.

“We have taken care and attention to ensure that Phi Gamma’s structural integrity and usefulness extend well into the future,” says Doug Hicks, dean of Oxford College. “Most of all, we are delighted that this historic building will once again be an eminent space for public conversation and the exchange of ideas.”

Phi Gamma is Emory’s oldest academic building, built when Emory College was located on its original campus in Oxford almost seventy years before its move to Atlanta in 1919. Student and alumni members of the Phi Gamma Literary Society began raising funds for its construction as early as the 1840s. The building’s white-marble cornerstone commemorates their efforts with a Latin inscription attesting that the Phi Gamma Society was established in 1837 and that the cornerstone was laid on February 22, 1851.

Emory College closed during the Civil War, and in 1864 both Phi Gamma Hall and Few Hall, the building across the Quad housing the rival Few Literary Society, served in the care of Confederate wounded brought to the Covington area following the Battle of Atlanta. (Oxford legend holds that the ghost of a Confederate nurse is sometimes seen outside Phi Gamma Hall.)

About 1948 Phi Gamma’s central room was restored and made into a small auditorium, which was also the scene of dances in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1980 it became a black-box theater and the college’s main venue for dramatic and other performances until 2003 and the completion of the Tarbutton Performing Arts Center, located across the Quad from Phi Gamma and attached to Few Hall. Not wanting to leave Phi Gamma vacant, the college designated it as a 24/7 student study space, keeping that purpose until late 2017 and the start of the current restoration.

With the project’s completion, Phi Gamma Hall has come full circle as an academic building, dedicated again as a place for public discourse.

HEAD SPACE HOW OUR BRAINS PERCEIVE THE PHYSICAL WORLD Nearly thirty years ago, scientists demonstrated that visually recognizing an object, such as a cup, and performing a visually guided action, such as picking the cup up, involved distinct neural processes, located in different areas of the brain. A new study shows that the same is true for how the brain perceives our environment—it has two distinct systems, one for recognizing a place and another for navigating through it.

The Journal of Neuroscience published the finding by researchers at Emory University, based on experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results showed that the brain’s parahippocampal place area responded more strongly to a scene recognition task while the occipital place area responded more to a navigation task.

The work could have important implications for helping people to recover from brain injuries and for the design of computer vision systems, such as self-driving cars.

“It’s thrilling to learn what different regions of the brain are doing,” says Daniel Dilks, senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychology.

“Learning how the mind makes sense of all the information that we’re bombarded with every day is one of the greatest of intellectual quests. It’s about understanding what makes us human.”

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

1 7

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

I N C L ASS

THAT LOOKS DELICIOUS

COURSE TITLE

ENG 101: Good Taste— The Art of Food Advertising

FACULTY CV Kayla Shipp Kamibayashi, a PhD candidate in the graduate Department of English at Emory College, combines her unique educational background in English, computer science, and digital humanities to craft a class that challenges first-year students to examine everything they see through the lens of art, analysis, and human nature.

Shipp Kamibayashi found the perfect combination of elements to teach firstyear writing by placing the emphasis on food—“something that everyone connects with”—and advertising—something people are bombarded with daily. Using classic works of art like Still Life with Skull by

18

EMORY MAGAZINE

TOOTH IN ADVERTISING Students study and discuss vintage ads to understand the impact of food advertising from the early 1900s to the present.

French artist Paul Cézanne and Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer’s The Four Elements: Fire alongside highly styled food photography from her own collection of vintage magazines and advertisements and modern documentaries like Netflix’s Chef’s Table and Ugly Delicious, Shipp Kamibayashi first exposes students to analysis before applying the same ideas to food advertising and writing.

TODAY’S LECTURE Students break into small groups to choose and analyze advertising from vintage twentieth-century magazines— from the 1910s through the 1970s—including The Mother’s Magazine and Gourmet.

Students record their first impressions of the ads, discussing what they see in the ads (shapes, objects, words, patterns, contrasts) and what they don’t see (what they expect to see but don’t), and writing about them. The class then discusses how the imagery and text, or lack thereof, changed their perception of the ads and the products they were promoting.

WINTER 2019

QUOTES TO NOTE “I want them to find the cultural tensions and themes in the images and derive their own claims from them. One of the overarching goals is getting them to understand why we see what we see. By looking at the constructs behind the way we look at food—food styling, what’s honest, what’s dishonest, how do you portray it—I want them to read out of it instead of into it.”

—Kayla Shipp Kamibayashi STUDENTS SAY “I took a literary writing class in high school that analyzed a lot of different types of writing and stories. I am interested in marketing, and I thought it would be interesting to take an English class that looks at analysis through marketing. We started with sixteenth-century pieces of art and we got to dive into the history of that and how it relates to what we see now. It has been challenging, but interesting.”

— Priya Yadav 22C

P H O T O G R A P H Y K AY H I N TO N

COURSE DESCRIPTION For centuries, humans have illustrated what we eat—from cave paintings to fast food advertisements—and revealed a lot about ourselves in the process. In this class, students work with the instructor to answer two questions: what draws us to food as a subject, and how should we write about it? The class looks at the way depictions of food illustrate how we communicate as individuals and as a society of different genders, races, and classes.

They begin by looking at the ways what we eat has been painted and photographed, leading to a semester-long exploration of food advertising and how it can teach us to write in direct and compelling ways. Students practice cultural and rhetorical analysis by looking closely at historical food descriptions and depictions, and sharpen composition skills by creating food advertisements of their own, culminating in an analytical paper and portfolio.

SONG BIRDS . . .

HOW THEY TRAIN THEIR BRAINS TO GIVE A LITTLE WHISTLE

P H O T O G R A P H Y E M O R Y P H OTO V I D E O

Songbirds learn to sing in a way similar to how humans learn to speak—by listening to their fathers and trying to duplicate the sounds. The bird’s brain sends commands to the vocal muscles to sing what it hears, and then the brain keeps trying to adjust the command until the sound echoes the one made by the parent.

During such trial-and-error processes of sensorimotor learning, a bird remembers not just the best possible command, but a whole suite of possibilities, suggests a recent Emory study.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) published the study results, which include a new mathematical model for the distribution of sensory errors in learning.

“Our findings suggest that an animal knows that even the perfect neural command is not going to result in the right outcome every time,” says Ilya Nemenman, an Emory professor of biophysics and senior author of the paper.

“Animals, including humans, want to explore and keep track of a range of possibilities when learning something in order to compensate for variabilities.”

Nemenman uses the example of learning to swing a tennis racket.

“You’re only rarely going to hit the ball in the racket’s exact sweet spot,” he says.

“And every day when you pick up the racket to play, your swing is going to be a little bit different, because your body is

different, the racket and the ball are different, and the environmental conditions are different. So your body needs to remember a whole range of commands, in order to adapt to these different situations and get the ball to go where you want.”

First author of the study is Baohua Zhou, a graduate student of physics.

Coauthors include David Hofmann and Itai Pinkoviezky (postdoctoral fellows in physics) and Samuel Sober, an associate professor of biology.

Traditional theories of learning propose that animals use sensory error signals to zero in on the optimal motor

command, based on a normal distribution of possible errors around it—what is known as a bell curve. Those theories, however, cannot explain the behavioral observations that small sensory errors are more readily corrected, while the larger ones may be ignored by the animal altogether.

“The birds are not just trying to sing in the best possible way, but appear to be exploring and trying wide variations,” Nemenman says. “In this way, they learn to correct small errors, but they don’t even try to correct large errors, unless the large error is broken down and built up gradually.”—Carol Clark

. . . SONG BOOKS DIGITAL PROJECT BRINGS NOTES TO LIFE The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) has received a $260,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for its project, Sounding Spirit, an initiative to publish digital and print editions of widely popular but currently inaccessible books of American Protestant music from 1850 to 1925.

The three-year grant from the NEH’s Scholarly Editions and Translations program will fund the editing and production of editions of five songbooks of gospel music, spirituals, shape-note music, and lined-out hymn singing.

“These nineteenth-century Southern music genres had a profound influence across American music and culture, and are at the root of American jazz, soul, country, and rock music,” says Jesse P. Karlsberg (above), ECDS senior digital scholarship strategist and director of the project.

Yet these works weren’t appreciated or sought out by scholars until recently.

“Many of these books circulated widely and were popular and influential works, with dozens of printings and hundreds of thousands of copies,” says Karlsberg.

“But you can pick a fifteen-square-mile part of Georgia at random and find more of these books in attics than in the world’s libraries.”

Karlsberg’s research on the roots of American music, begun as a PhD student at Emory’s Laney Graduate School, led him to these works—and to the gap in modern scholarship on their importance. “We need to make these works widely available again and model what interacting with these books can look like.”

The editions, richly annotated with text and multimedia, will be built using Readux, a platform created by ECDS for browsing, annotating, and publishing digitized books.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

1 9

Be One in a Million EMORY HELPS BUILD A MAJOR DATABASE DESIGNED TO DRIVE A NEW, MORE EFFECTIVE APPROACH TO MEDICINE

C

arl McKinney is one of us.

The seventy-six-year-old retired air traffic controller is participating in All of Us, an ambitious project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to collect detailed health information from one million or more volunteers across the country during the next ten years.

Emory is involved in the effort as a member of the Southeast Enrollment Center network, which includes medical research centers at the University of Miami, Morehouse College, and the University of Florida. These institutions, along with dozens of health care providers and health-related organizations, are soliciting patient data for an enormous database that will serve as an open resource for researchers studying how individual differences in biology and genetics, lifestyle, environment, gender, ethnicity, and other variables may influence overall health and the pathology of complex diseases, according to Michael Zwick, Emory’s principal investigator for the project and assistant vice president for research in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center.

In addition, since the NIH typically doesn’t provide funding for large control groups in disease-related studies, Zwick notes, “By sampling the broad general population, All of Us could make every NIH-funded, targeted study more powerful because you’ll be able to get a wellmatched set of control individuals.”

Zwick and faculty from the School of Medicine and the Rollins School of Public Health are enrolling as many

Emory Healthcare patients as possible.

Participation in All of Us is open to anyone living in the US over age eighteen, regardless of health status and whether or not they receive health care through Emory. Children will be eligible at a later date.

In McKinney’s case, “I’ve been going to Emory since moving to Atlanta from Maryland in 2006—my primary care doctor and cardiologist are attached to Emory Healthcare,” he says. “I’ve been asked before for permission to use my health information when they were trying to find ways to better treat patients with certain diseases, so when I was asked to participate in All of Us, I said yes.

“Initially, I answered some questionnaires online and then went over to Emory where they drew blood and took urine for tests.

Basically, that’s been it thus far.

They said they would contact me later once they established the database and they require additional information.”

Blood and urine samples are used to evaluate markers of disease, including genetic factors, says Alvaro Alonso, associate professor at Rollins School of Public Health. Measurements from a basic physical exam— including weight, height, and blood pressure—are taken as well.

“Participants also agree to share the information from their electronic medical records with

FROM PATIENT TO PARTICIPANT As part of the NIH All of Us study, Emory Healthcare patient Carl McKinney (right, at his church, where he is also an active participant) will contribute to a new body of data intended to advance health care across fields.

20

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

the study, and to be part of the study for at least the next ten years,” he adds.

“They also may be asked to complete additional online surveys and invited to participate in additional exams.”

All of Us volunteers will be kept up-to-date about new health-related discoveries stemming from research activities that use the database.

One of McKinney’s concerns was the confidentiality of his personal data.

The All of Us collection and storage systems have been designed to meet the requirements of the Federal Information Security Management Act. They are continually tested to ensure the security of patient data and protect against its unintended release, and penalties have been set for the unauthorized reidentification of participants.

“I was told that when my information is sent to the NIH, it would not be attached to my specific name but to a patient number, and I had no problem with that,” McKinney recalls.

To maximize its usefulness, All of Us recruiters expect to reach out to people

PHOTOGRAPHY STEPHEN NOWL AND

P O I N TS O F I N T E R E ST

P H O T O G R A P H Y I S TO C K

underserved by the current health care system, such as individuals who lack insurance or live in rural areas without ready access to medical care.

“This is a real challenge,” Zwick says. “There are mechanisms by which these people can participate, and we are engaged in ongoing discussions about ways to recruit them for the database.”

Likewise for minorities, whose participation will help ensure that the database reflects the country’s diverse racial and ethnic makeup, says coinvestigator Arshed Quyyumi, a professor of cardiology and head of the Cardiovascular Research Institute.

“Traditionally, there has been very little minority participation when studies have been done, particularly clinical trials, and therefore the resulting data doesn’t necessarily apply to them,” he observes.

“You’re left with some questions as to whether or not what is found in the studies is applicable to the population at large or only to Caucasians.”—Gary Goettling

BR AIN BURN New center will study brain inf lammation Emory is forming a new center for the study of brain inflammation, a critical mechanism in several chronic diseases of the nervous system and neurodegenerative diseases.

Inflammation is an essential part of the body’s response to infection or injury. In certain situations, immune cells and substances they release can enter the nervous system and cause lasting cell and tissue damage, whether subtle or overt. Evidence is piling up that chronic brain inflammation drives the progression of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, as well as contributing to autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, and the consequences of viral infections like HIV and Zika.

The director of the Center for Neurodysfunction and Inflammation (CNI) will be Malú G. Tansey, professor of physiology at the School of Medicine.

“It’s become clear that healthy brain function is the result of communication between the immune system and the nervous system, and the field of neuroimmunology is expanding beyond autoimmune diseases,” Tansey says. “Neurological disorders can arise from or be exacerbated by dysfunction and chronic inflammation coming from outside the brain. The good news is that it may be possible to treat, delay, or perhaps prevent some of these neurological disorders by harnessing the power of the immune system.”

The center will stoke collaborations among basic, translational, and clinical investigators with complementary expertise and promote access to shared resources, such as

equipment and banks of tissue samples. The CNI will work alongside existing centers at Emory including the NIH-funded Udall Center for Excellence in Parkinson’s Research and the Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center to further enhance the scientific environment for high-impact brain research.

The CNI will be part of the Emory Brain Health Center and will partner with the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease, led by Allan Levey, Goizueta Endowed Chair for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, Betty Gage Holland Chair, and director of the Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

“Growing evidence implicates neuroinflammation as a key mediator of many brain diseases,” says Levey. “Emory has growing strengths in this important area of research.”

Last spring, the Goizueta Foundation made a $25 million grant to the Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center to support efforts alinged with the new center.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

2 1

E M O RY A N D AT L A N TA

22

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

with atlanta as the line of scrimmage, emory’s pros are in position for game day: alumni in leadership roles, sports doctors on standby, and faculty figuring out the fans

By scott henry, patrick adams 08mph, eric rangus, and Pellom McDaniels III photography by stephen nowland and ann watson

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

2 3

the Super Bowl Advisory Board. “It is a true testament to our people, capabilities, and city that we have been selected to host the 2018 College Football Playoff National Championship, 2019 Super Bowl LIII, and 2020 Final Four within a threeyear period. I am honored to be one of many volunteers from Emory who are excited to showcase all Atlanta has to offer.” hen the final whistle blows at Ryan Hamilton, associate professor of marketing at Super Bowl LIII in Mercedes-Benz Goizueta Business School, agrees that hosting the Super Stadium in February, it will signal Bowl—for the third time—can only help burnish Atlanta’s not just the end of the game, but of image as a top-tier American city. months of planning and preparation “Any coverage is good for the city’s brand, and this spotby thousands of Atlantans—including light is likely to show people that the city is more cosmopolia number of key Emory players. tan and diverse than they might have thought,” he explains.

But the city and the region as a Goizueta marketing professor Michael Lewis adds that whole will continue reaping the rewards hosting the big game could help improve Atlanta’s image as a long after the championship rings have been handed out and sports town, despite a history of also-ran teams. the crowds have gone home.

“This is one of the best things the city can do to get its “Hosting the Super Bowl keeps Atlanta on the national name out there and gain credibility and legitimacy,” he says. and international stage, especially since football now enjoys “We’ve just built a world-class stadium, and team owner a worldwide following,” says Dan Gordon 99C 05MBA, chief Arthur Blank [an Emory trustee emeritus] has done a great job of staff in the Emory Office of the President and a member of of boosting fandom for the Falcons and Atlanta United.”

And local sports fans are all warmed up. In December, Atlanta United electrified the city with its Major League Soccer championship victory.

Of course, someone has to help make sure that Atlanta lives up to the hype.

That’s where the nine board members of the Atlanta Super Bowl LIII Host Committee come in.

A. J. Robinson 77BBA, the longtime president of Central Atlanta Progress and Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, is another Emory team member calling the plays.

He and his fellow committee Daniel Gordon 99C 05MBA a. j. robinson 77bba Shan Cooper 89C 95MBA Number: 98, the year he met Number: 7, his favorite number Number: 7, “which means members are responsible for his wife at Emory College Position: Member of the Super perfection or completeness. coordinating with Centennial Position: Super Bowl Advisory Bowl LIII Host Committee board; Atlanta is the perfect city for Olympic Park, the Georgia Board member; vice president president of Central Atlanta the Super Bowl!”

World Congress Center, and and chief of staff, Emory Office Progress, a private business Position: Super Bowl Host other public venues to ensure of the President association founded in 1941; Committee board member; Top Stat: Before coming to member of the advisory board executive director, Atlanta they’re ready; lining up the Emory, Gordon served as COO for Emory’s Center for Ethics Committee for Progress; former ten thousand volunteers who for the City of Atlanta; previous- Top Stat: Previously Robinson chief transformation officer for will help shepherd more than ly, he worked in management was president of Portman WestRock; Emory trustee one million expected visitors for six years at the Arthur M. Holdings, where he managed Top Stat: Cooper was named around town; and raising Blank Family of Businesses the operations of the real Georgia Trend’s 2015 Most and is the board chair-elect of estate development and Respected Business Leader and local sponsorship money to Leadership Atlanta. architectural firm. one of the Women of the Year be used by the NFL in staging by the American Association events such as free concerts.

T H E K I C KO F F

ATLANTA IMPACT

W

team emory

98

7

7

of University Women.

24

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

time out

WHAAAT, no football team?

GAME FACES Alexander Isakov (left), head of Emory’s emergency response program, and Ricardo Martinez

help host cities prepare to handle unexpected situations during the Super Bowl. Martinez, who holds a faculty position in Emory’s School of Medicine, has been a senior medical adviser to the National Football League since 1988, facilitating medical care, emergency planning, preparedness, and public health for the main event.

The committee also has worked with local authorities on providing public safety and transit services during Super Bowl week, including an inclement weather plan to help fans get to the stadium in the event of an ice storm—like the one in 2000 that froze downtown just before Super Bowl XXXIV. “The legacy of the Olympics is that Atlanta has become a major destination for large events,” Robinson says. “The feeling here is that anything is possible, that the city can rise to any challenge.”

One of those challenges is the potential for emergencies, from a single football player with a head injury to an unanticipated public incident or natural disaster that could send multiple patients to the nearest ER. The city’s investment in emergency preparedness was a major factor in earning Atlanta the Super Bowl LIII bid.

Alexander Isakov, Emory director of prehospital and disaster medicine and of the Center for Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR), has helped to craft contingency plans and training for the past two Super Bowls in Houston and Minneapolis, and he is doing the same in Emory’s hometown.

Because of the large crowds that can clog city arteries on game day, emergency medical responders need to be ready to provide urgent care while minimizing transports, he says— meaning the possible need for more immediate, on-site care.

Oddly enough, Emory’s lack of a football team can be credited to baseball. In 1884 and 1886, the university played the University of Georgia and was soundly beaten both times, amid rumors of gambling and other unsportsmanlike activities. In 1891, Emory’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution against intercollegiate sports “in view of [their] demoralizing influence . . . upon the habits of students and the strong tendency to gambling which such games foster.”

“In every host city, we work with professionals dedicated to serving their community,” he says. “There is a distinct difference in how a venue plans for a regular season game and how they plan for the Super Bowl, because it is so complex and high-profile.”

Another point that worked in Atlanta’s favor was the top-flight level 1 trauma center at Grady Memorial Hospital, closely affiliated with Emory’s School of Medicine.

Last spring, Hany Atallah, Emory associate professor and Grady’s chief of emergency medicine, was part of a high-level public discussion about preparations for the big day.

Atallah said Grady will be prepared “hospital wide” for any eventuality and will increase staffing during Super Bowl weekend. “You really need to be able to provide medical support if there’s a disaster or something like that,” Atallah said.

The Emory support team also includes Anwar Osborne, an emergency medicine doctor who will be the airway management physician on the field on game day.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

2 5

time out athletics for all

President Warren Candler’s contention in 1919 that intercollegiate sports are “evil, only evil, and that continually” didn’t help Emory in the athletics arena.

Competition with other schools was forbidden until 1945, but that didn’t stop students from playing. Emory’s intramural program, summed up by the motto “Athletics for All,” flourished from its beginnings and remains lively today. Student participation is about 50 percent, thriving alongside the eighteen varsity sports programs (which still do not include football).

HANDOFF TO THE NEXT GENERATION Artist Muhammad Yungai’s Helping Hands, one of the Off the Wall mu-

rals, celebrates major figures who have moved Atlanta forward.

As a city leader, Robinson is especially pleased that the Host Committee decided to take on a selection of projects with local impact.

For starters, the group invited the Atlanta-based International Human Trafficking Institute to train Super Bowl volunteers in identifying possible victims of sex trafficking. And in August, the committee held a groundbreaking for $2 million worth of upgrades at John F. Kennedy Park in the Vine City neighborhood just west of the stadium.

One of the committee’s proudest achievements is a public art initiative called Off the Wall that supported the creation of some thirty permanent murals in visible places around the city. Curated by the local WonderRoot arts organization, the $1 million program artists from across the country create works on the theme of civil and human rights, a subject with which the hometown of Martin Luther King Jr. is strongly identified.

Carlton Mackey 05MDiv, director of the Ethics & the Arts program at Emory’s Center for Ethics and a former WonderRoot board member, helped coordinate public forums to give local community members input on the murals’ messages.

“The Super Bowl is providing us a canvas and a huge audience, but our hope is that the neighborhoods will embrace the 26

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

artwork and that the murals will continue to provoke dialogue long after the game is over,” Mackey says. “By exploring Atlanta’s civil rights history—past, present, and future—this project should further advance Atlanta as a city where social justice is a major concern.”

Host Committee board member Shan Cooper 89C 95MBA, executive director of Atlanta Committee for Progress and an Emory trustee, believes the mural project offers Atlanta a lasting opportunity to showcase its best side.

“We really wanted to tell our story as a city where people work together,” she says.

It was also important for the committee to be able to leverage Super Bowl week to provide a positive experience to the city as a whole—not just those lucky enough to have a ticket.

“Our goal was to enable people who couldn’t make it to the game to still participate,” Cooper says. A self-described huge football fan and Falcons booster, she says she’ll be watching the game on TV. While the Super Bowl will certainly be a windfall for Atlanta’s hospitality industry, Gordon, who served three years as the city’s chief operating officer, believes the event’s biggest payoff may be in providing a weeklong showcase for Mercedes-Benz Stadium and other amenities.

“We’re doing all we can to make sure that all of Atlanta benefits from this event,” he says. “Atlanta is unique in its ability to focus on a certain challenge and bring people together to make sure it’s a success.”—Scott Henry

S EC O N D Q UA RT E R

DOCS TO THE PROS When Matt Ryan, the All-Pro quarterback of the Atlanta

Falcons, drops back to pass, he might look for Tevin Coleman in the flats, or Mohamed Sanu on a slant, or his favorite target, the superstar receiver Julio Jones, streaking up the sideline.

But Ryan knows that no matter what the play-call, one thing never changes—at every game, in every city, Spero Karas, Emory associate professor of orthopaedic surgery, is on the thirty-yard line, eyes fixed on the field, ready for whatever the day may bring.

“My mantra is stay detached, stay clinical, stay alert,” says Karas, who, as the Falcons’ head team physician, sees to it that players are, as he puts it, “wrapped in a blanket of worldclass care.”

That care extends far beyond the sidelines. It starts with preseason screenings of eye and heart health, continues with

training in injury prevention, and invariably involves the surgical and medical care of injuries and illnesses—everything from torn ligaments and broken bones to dehydration, the common cold, and concussions.

For all of it, Karas draws on the resources of Emory Healthcare—now the official team health care provider of the Atlanta Falcons with some of the finest specialists in the field.

Among them is Brandon Mines, Falcons team physician and an assistant professor of orthopaedics with expertise in conditions of the knee, wrist, ankle, and upper extremities.

“I enjoy heloping the players stay healthy and get back to the game they love,” Mines says. “It’s great to build a rapport with them and help them stay focused when there are so many distractions around them.”

Jeffrey Webb, an assistant professor of orthopaedics and the Falcons’ concussion specialist; Kyle Hammond, an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in ligament injuries to the knee, shoulder, and elbow; and John Xerogeanes 92M, chief of the Emory Sports Medicine Center and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery.

team emory

54

32

80

Number: 54, his number as a college football player Position: Chief of emergency medicine for Grady Health System; associate professor of emergency medicine Top Stat: Atallah was the 2014 Georgia College of Emergency Physicians Medical Director of the Year and the 2013 Georgia Association of Physician Assistants Physician of the Year for 2013. He also was a finalist for the prestigious Franz Edelman Award for Excellence in Operations Research.

Number: 32, his high school football number Position: Head team physician for the Atlanta Falcons and team orthopaedist for the Atlanta Braves; asssociate professor of orthopaedic surgery; director of the Emory Orthopaedic Sports Medicine Fellowship Program Top Stat: As team doctor for the Falcons since 2011, Karas is frequently sought out for media interviews and has been consistently honored as one of Atlanta Magazine’s Top Doctors.

Number: 80, Jerry Rice’s number Position: Atlanta Falcons team physician; assistant professor of orthopaedics and of family medicine Top Stat: Mines serves as head team physician for the Women’s National Basketball Association’s (WNBA) Atlanta Dream. He is also a rotational physician for US soccer teams.

Hany Atallah

Spero Karas

brandon mines

WINTER 2019

1

scott boden

Number: 1—he likes to be first Position: Director of the Emory Orthopaedics and Spine Center; chair of the Department of Orthopaedics and chief of orthopaedic and musculoskeletal medicine for Emory Healthcare Top Stat: A noted visionary in the treatment of musculoskeletal conditions, Boden was recently named principal investigator for a $13 million grant from the Marcus Foundation to support a multicenter clinical trial studying stem cell options.

EMORY MAGAZINE

2 7

Emory’s Sports Medicine Center now has digs in the “I was always frustrated when I got hurt and couldn’t get Sports Medicine Complex, a new, state-of-the-art facility that back to play,” Xerogeanes, who is known to his patients as “Dr. doubles as the official practice and training site for the Atlanta X,” recalls of his college days as a linebacker at the University of California–Davis. “I had a great team doctor who helped me Hawks. Not surprisingly, it features a pair of full-length basketball courts and adjacent training areas, a film room, out a lot, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do.” a recovery room, and a separate entrance for the big guys.

A former collegiate athlete himself, Karas lettered in But Atlanta’s pros are hardly the only patients who receive wrestling at the University of Notre Dame and was a threecare at the 90,000-square-foot facility. sport star in high school in Indiana. He saw his first action “We take care of ordinary recreational athletes and high with the NFL while completing his sports medicine fellowship school kids with the same doctors and therapists, and in the in Colorado, where he served as an assistant team doctor for same place, that we take care of Olympic athletes and profesthe Denver Broncos. Several years later, he signed on with sionals,” says Scott Boden, chair of orthopaedics and director the Falcons, becoming the youngest head team physician in of the Emory Orthopaedics and Spine Center. the league.

Founded in 1994 with just four physicians, the center now But Karas’s work isn’t confined to the clinic. A distinboasts two dozen specialists in every aspect of spine care, with guished researcher, he’s contributed to significant advances in a hospital and seven full-service clinics throughout metro rotator cuff repair surgery. And as director of the Emory OrAtlanta in addition to the Sports Medicine Complex. thopaedic Sports Medicine Fellowship Program, he oversees “We’re blessed to be one of the largest spine centers in the training of young surgeons just starting their careers. academic medicine in the country,” says Boden.

With its wealth of resources and roster of renowned The accumulation of noted expertise has made the center specialists, Emory is a particularly attractive place one of a select few to be listed as a preferred provider for to do that. Sports medicine fellows get to work closely with retired NFL players—who come with a different set of physical elite athletes—and not only the Falcons. Emory Healthcare challenges than current players. also serves as the official team health care provider for the “The retired players have more chronic arthritic problems Atlanta Hawks, the Atlanta Braves, and the Atlanta Dream, as well as Georgia Tech and several other college and high school and less acute injuries,” Boden says. athletic associations.

“They travel with the teams, help out at the games, and sit in on the evaluations,” says Karas. “And that has a lot of appeal.”

Long a niche specialty within the field of orthopaedics, sports medicine has exploded during the past two decades, a product in large part of the exponential growth of organized sports.

Kids are starting sports earlier and increasingly playing them year-round, while adults are more frequently engaging in vigorous exercise, with many staying active well into their eighties.

All that exercise has been a boon to public health, but it’s also led to a sharp increase in sports-related injuries. Emory Healthcare has responded to the need, UNDER OBSERVATION “As a physician, you are not a fan, and you are not a coach,” Falcons head physician adding faculty members, forg- Spero Karas (above, right) told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in a recent interview. “You are a physician. When ing partnerships, and building I am observing the game, I am observing the players and my primary focus is not the score. I am an academic surgeon, and my mantra is stay detached, stay clinical, and stay in the moment.” new facilities.

28

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

The sports medicine team also is vigilant about the now-well-documented effects of repeated bluntforce trauma to the head.

There was little public awareness of the link between football and degenerative brain diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, until a decade ago. That’s when sports medicine experts, including from the NFL, began to acknowledge and draw attention to the longterm effects of concussions.

The 2015 movie Constop pushing cussion and other real-life stories brought to light by From 1923 to 1955, the game players have led to greatof pushball was a campus er understanding of the tradition between freshmen long-term risks of football, and sophomores. It was played with a 180-pound accompanied by increased leather ball and 25 people precautions, improved per team on the field, with prediction models, and the goal to push the ball into new treatments. Still, the the other team’s end zone. intense scrutiny has fueled It was banned in 1955 because it caused too many fears of CTE among players injuries. A modern-day both active and retired. version of pushball was “What we’re seeing now brought back for a day is a huge amount of anxiety as part of Emory’s 175th around this condition,” says anniversary celebration.

Anthony Stringer, Emory professor of rehabilitation medicine. “There’s a whole mishmash of symptoms associated with [CTE], so players are frightened that they could get it or that they have it.”

A clinical neuropsychologist, Stringer focuses on helping people maintain their cognitive independence after an impairment—whether from brain injury, stroke, or simply aging.

“Truthfully, sports concussion is a very small part of our patient population,” he says. “The majority of our patients are experiencing difficulties because of brain injury in a car accident or a small stroke.”

But with all the publicity surrounding CTE, he says, football players have become hyper-vigilant about any small blip in cognition. During the past decade, dozens have come to him with concerns.

“We’ve even had Canadian Football League players come in to see if what they’re experiencing matches what we call CTE or what their risk is for developing it,” he says. “I saw a a player recently who looked good, but had some memory

P H O T O G R A P H Y K A R A S : J I M M Y C R I B B , AT L A N TA FA L C O N S ; P U S H B A L L A N D S P O R T S M E D I C I N E : E M O R Y P H OTO V I D E O

time out

impairment in excess of what one should for his age, and he was worried about his children.”

That player decided to retire, he says—but with their athletic careers at stake, “Others are willing to take the risk.”

Stringer says his job is often just to allay players’ fears, to let them know it’s normal to forget where they left their car keys or why they walked into a room. But not always.

“There are those times,” he adds, “where we do see things that advise us to tell the athlete, well, yeah, you are showing problems and you have to think about whether or not you want to put yourself at further risk.”

With Atlanta set to host Super Bowl LIII, Emory’s sports doctors are prepared to get their heads in the game—whatever role they might be called on to play.

“We can be a liaison for the teams’ medical staffs,” says Karas. “Whatever they need, we’re here to provide resources.”

WHEN THE ‘SNAP’ IS NOT THE GOOD KIND Emory’s recently completed Sports Medicine Complex is health care home base for Atlanta’s major sports teams.

But the players are only part of the production. Emory Healthcare is offering priority medical services to the “NFL Family,” the organization’s family members and myriad contractors—about three thousand total—through a dedicated phone line staffed by specialists during the events.

And when the big game is over, Emory’s sports medicine team keeps on practicing. You could be a WNBA Atlanta Dream player, or an Atlanta Rollergirl, or a college or highschool soccer player—and still be treated by Falcons docs like Brandon Mines.

“I chose sports medicine because it really does encompass patients who are excited about exercising and like to stay fit,” Mines says. “I like to help people get back to their sports after an injury, because it’s very important to them.”—Patrick Adams 08MPH WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

2 9

WHAT DEFINES A FAN You turn on the television and see a sea of blue. Or black.

Or red. It depends on what game you’re watching.

The color palettes of the stands at any college or pro football game will tell you who’s rooting for whom, but how do all those fans decide to pull for this team or that one? Is it as easy as rolling out of bed and throwing on whichever jersey is clean, or is there some deeper meaning behind fandom?

Maybe. Or maybe we’re fated from day one to root for the teams we do. Two Emory professors want to find out.

According to the research—and the personal experience— of faculty members and sports fans Mike Lewis and Erin Tarver, fandom is most frequently the product of one’s family or one’s geography. But while their conclusions are similar, the paths they take to reach them, and the ways they incorporate fandom in their work, are notably different.

Growing up, Lewis loved football, but his English father was much more enamored with rugby and soccer. So, sportswise, Lewis bonded with his grandfather, a native of western Pennsylvania, and became a Steelers fan. Lewis spent his 1980s teenage years in Illinois and adopted the Chicago Bears. It was an easy thing to do, as the Super Bowl XX champion Bears were one of the most successful teams of their time and they unified the city in fandom in a way rarely seen before or since.

“But can you even be a fan of two teams? If you are a fan of two teams, are you a fan of anything?” asks Lewis, professor of marketing at Goizueta. It’s a question that comes up frequently in his sports marketing classes.

time out

Eagles Take Flight In 1960, Emory Wheel sports editor David Kross decided it was time Emory’s varsity squads had some kind of identity. Captain of the university’s first soccer team, Kross said other schools “just calling us the Emory nothings was not enough.” What moved him to choose an eagle? “It was just alliterative, and it sounded good,” he told the Wheel in a recent interview. “Also, it was short, and it was almost the same number of letters as in [Emory], so it looked good, too. It didn’t take up a lot of room, it was easy to say, and eagles can be reasonably hostile, even though we were not very hostile in those days as athletes. But eagles can be reasonably mean when they are provoked.”

30

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

“Fandom is an interesting type of customer loyalty,” he says. “It just blows away every other category you can come up with, except maybe politics. And it’s absolutely part of your identity.”

Tarver, associate professor of philosophy at Oxford College, is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a Louisiana State fan from birth. She grew up going to Death Valley (as LSU’s home field is called) with her father, and with only a little bit of prompting, she dives deep into Tiger trivia and personal game memories, both good and bad. Although Tarver moved away from Louisiana more than a decade ago, she says she still bleeds purple and gold.

“This metaphor of blood has a double meaning,” Tarver says, switching into philosopher mode. “It links me with people—my family and my community.”

As a child, Tarver didn’t question that community, but as she got older, she began to notice some of the disturbing trends of fandom. Most of the fans in the stands were white; most of the players on the field were black. Inside the stadium, there was a close relationship between the two. Outside of it, that relationship was divided, even hostile.

As Tarver got older, she wanted to make sense of these seemingly contradictory experiences. And as she entered the academic world and began to explore feminist philosophical thought, she noticed a distinct lack of research in sports and its various cross-sections.

“Feminist philosophers don’t often write about sports,” Tarver says. “Why is that? It’s so important to the communities we exist in that we should be talking about it more. It became this perfect and obvious thing for me to talk about, both to deal with my own experience and also try to critique it.”

Switch gears from philosophy to statistics. Since 2015, Lewis has published an annual ranking of the NFL’s best fans.

It’s a subject that’s been debated in bleachers and bars since the invention of the face mask, but Lewis takes pains to quantify what is often an overheated conversation.

To determine the best fans, Lewis ranks teams in three categories: Fan Equity (team revenues based on performance and market characteristics), Social Equity (fan participation across social media channels) and Road Equity (how well teams draw away from home). Once the numbers are crunched and the list compiled, it’s the usual suspects who come out ahead. The top five for 2018 are, in order: Dallas Cowboys,

P H O T O G R A P H Y E M O R Y P H OTO V I D E O

H A L F T I M E C O M M E N TA RY

PHOTOGRAPHY STEPHEN NOWL AND

New England Patriots, Philadelphia Eagles, New York Giants, and Pittsburgh Steelers.

“I’m a statistician,” Lewis says. “Fandom is an interesting combination that you can look at from a variety of perspectives, but because of who I am, I’m always going to try and take the logical argument and quantify that if at all possible.”

According to Lewis, the strongest sports team brands do have similarities. They tend to be located in large metro areas.

They often have a long history. And they prove themselves as winners over time.

The Atlanta Falcons, Lewis says, are an interesting case.

The Falcons have been trending upward in Lewis’s rankings, and in 2018, they sit at No. 13 out of thirty-two NFL teams.

They’ve had some recent success, and the Mercedes-Benz Stadium is a jewel, but Atlanta is a tough town. It’s one of the nation’s largest metro areas, but a transient one, too. A lot of Atlanta football fans came from somewhere else, and they brought their hometown jerseys with them.

“When students come to Emory from out of state, they already have teams,” Lewis says. “In class I see a lot of Giants, Jets, and Patriots jerseys. It’s tough for the Falcons to break through that. Sports brands are generational. You can move them, but they move slowly. Still, the Falcons are doing a lot of the right things with the new stadium, star players, and a better team.”

The attraction to winning teams isn’t lost on Tarver. But it’s not altogether attractive, either. As an LSU fan, her team “would always be the one to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” That changed when the Tigers won the national championship in 2004 and again in 2008.

“That’s the thing about winning, it’s addictive. You come to expect it and you become kind of an insufferable person as a fan,” Tarver laughs. “As a sports fan as well as someone who is critical of it, that’s not a good look for anyone. When your team wins, it’s not like, ‘I feel so happy for those guys. It’s like, ‘WE won!’ The victory is radiating from you, because you so closely identify with it. That’s why people are fans.”

Social scientists call this BIRGing: Basking in Reflected Glory. It’s nice work if you can get it. Lots of teams don’t win, though. In fact, a lot of the losing can be downright painful.

So there has to be some reason fans remain drawn to the many, many teams that don’t win championships.

“BIRGing doesn’t deal with the minutiae of sports fandom,” Tarver says. “Keeping up with trades, arguing with people about pitching changes, reading about front-office drama.

These are disciplinary practices that become a part of a fan’s daily habits. It’s similar to a religious practice. Even if you never have a victory, there is still quite a lot of payoff. You become a member of a group that has significance beyond yourself.”

Tarver’s first book, The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity, published in 2017, was originally envisioned as a defense of sports fandom. After all, she’d been a sports fan all her life; what better way to legitimize that experience?

team emory

3

23

Number: 3, because it was Kevin Faulk’s number when he was running back for LSU in the 90s, but it’s also a great philosophical number Position: Associate professor of philosophy, Oxford College Top Stat: Tarver is the author of The I in Team: Sports Fandom and the Reproduction of Identity, published in June 2017, and she was recently interviewed for an ESPN docuseries on college football.

Number: 23 Position: Professor of marketing, Goizueta Business School Top Stat: Lewis posts his fan rankings on his Emory-hosted blog (scholarblogs.emory.edu/ esma), along with a wide variety of other musings on sports analytics, sports marketing and branding, and related subjects.

Lewis’s podcast, Fanalytics, is currently 22 episodes deep and includes appearances by Emory colleagues.

Erin Tarver

Michael Lewis

But as she began doing research, the fan experience got a bit murkier. As a child, Tarver saw how sports could divide people as well as unite them—over gender, race, even hometown loyalty.

“What I decided to do through the book is do a little soul searching myself and try to explain to myself and others how fandom works and why it’s meaningful to so many people,” Tarver says.

Public reaction to the book has been positive, although it’s not without the predictable lamentations: Can’t we just enjoy things?

Tarver has an answer.

“As a philosopher, I just want to say . . . no,” she laughs.

“It’s my job to get you to think about the things you don’t want to think about. We are all involved in things that are meaningful but are nevertheless ethically problematic. We need to change the way we relate to them. Let’s pay attention to the ways that these things that may be deeply meaningful to us are, in fact, harmful, so that we can do something about it.”

—Eric Rangus WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

3 1

PASSING IT ON My oldest football memory is of watching the Houston Oilers play against the Los Angeles Rams on television in 1978. I was ten years old. I don’t recall if I was watching the game at my grandparents’ home or in my parents’ living room. All I remember is one play that has been forever emblazoned in my mind, and it was the single most important influence on my desire for and eventual pursuit of a professional career in football.

The Houston Astrodome, which at the time was recognized as a marvel of modern architecture, was the site of this epic battle.

In 1978, the star of the Oilers was a rookie running back named Earl Campbell. To a ten-year-old, he looked like a giant of a man in his uniform.

His shoulder and thigh pads seemed to be a part of him and not standard issue for sports and smarts football players. His powder Since 1983, 989 Emory blue silk-screened jersey with student-athletes have his number, 34, was like any earned All-American other team uniform. Howstatus. They also have ever, after a Rams’ turnover, distinguished themselves on the academic front; the Oilers gained possession 184 student-athletes of the ball on the opposing have been selected team’s twenty-two-yard line, as CoSIDA Academic and Campbell’s number 34 All-Americans. Since the jersey became a symbol of fall of 2000, the Eagles have earned 134 CoSIDA football glory.

Academic All-America I vividly recall the drama honors, topping all as it unfolded: It’s first down non-football playing and ten, Campbell is lined up institutions. in the “I” formation directly behind his fullback. On the snap, the quarterback, Dan Pastorini, quickly tosses the ball back to Campbell, who is moving to his left. As the play is unfolding, the fullback dives to cut block the penetrating defensive end, forcing Campbell to change course. Just as he plants his right foot, a Rams linebacker appears three yards in front of him, naively settling into position to absorb the charging Campbell. What

time out

32

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

happened next is still exciting after forty years.

As Campbell starts toward the line of scrimmage, he lowers his shoulders and accelerates towards the waiting linebacker. In an instant, Campbell’s helmet explodes into the chest of the unprepared player, who is instantly “poster-ized” forever. For athletes, that means that you have been embarrassed by an opposing player in such a way that if it was caught in camera, it would be worth publishing as a poster to account for a significant moment in sports history.

As Campbell continues down the field, it seems as if no one can stop him. He breaks not one, but three tackles. Rams players bounce off of him, grab at his jersey, but he can’t be stopped. With half the Rams team reaching at him, Campbell tears out of his now shredded powder blue jersey. When he was finally brought down, it takes three men to do it. And after the play, he was the first to bounce up, jog to the sideline, replace his jersey, and get ready for the next play.

What an awesome sight for a ten-year-old boy to see. He was a revelation. Earl Campbell was my first superhero.

When I had a chance to get my own authentic number 34 powder blue Oilers jersey with Earl Campbell’s name on the back, I wore it with pride. Who could have known that one play would have such a tremendous impact on my life?

Looking back now, I realize that in that single play there were lessons to be learned, all of which went well beyond game itself.

In that one play, Campbell demonstrated an ability to overcome adversity, run through obstacles, and what to do if you have the shirt literally torn off your back in the process: you pop up, get another shirt, and get back to work. What’s been even more remarkable for me to realize is that hundreds—no, thousands—of ten- and eleven-year-old African American boys watched the same play, at the same time, and thought to themselves, “I want to do that when I grow up.”

In that one moment, we saw our futures not as athletes, but as superheroes: kicking ass and taking names.

When I reflect on that moment of pure childhood freedom to dream of what I would like to be when I grew up, it’s hard to imagine that at one point in our country’s history, professional football and similar opportunities were once denied to African Americans due to America’s race prejudice. Seeing examples of men who looked like me, who were successful and celebrated, was inspirational, to say the least.

My career in professional football from 1991 to 2000 was an adventure I will never forget. Playing in the World League of American Football (1991–1992) and the National Football League (1992–2000), I was able to not only travel the world, but have experiences and create memories that have shaped who I am today. I have had hundreds of teammates, includ-

P H O T O G R A P H Y E M O R Y P H OTO V I D E O

FO U RT H Q UA RT E R

PHOTOGR APHY CO U RTESY M C DAN IELS

ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick recognized that he had an opportunity to bring attention to the killing of innocent African Americans at the hands of police officers charged with protecting the lives of citizens. Kaepernick’s identity as an African American male with his own experiences as a target of police resonated with other African American athletes, who recognized that they too have an obligation to make a statement.

Colin Kaepernick has created a movement that has excited young people to raise their voices in protest against the injustices that have an impact on all of us. Across the SPORTSMAN AND SCHOLAR Pellom McDaniels III is curator of African American Collections at Emory’s Stuart country, he has become A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. A former NFL defensive end, McDaniels played for the a model for students Philadelphia Eagles, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Atlanta Falcons. to speak up and speak out against police violence and other injustices that impact the marginalized ing NFL Hall of Famers Joe Montana, Marcus Allen, Derrick in our society.

Most important, he has forced us to reflect on Thomas, and Will Shields. While I was never part of a Super what it means to be a citizen in the United States.

Who says Bowl–winning team, the teams I played on were competitive that sports can’t provide a platform to influence our ideas and perennial contenders. about who we are as a society, and what we want out of life for Today, as discussions of the sport swirl around whether or ourselves, as well as our communities? not athletes should have the right to kneel during the playThe origins of African Americans in the game of footing of the national anthem, or what the future holds for the ball, and sports in general, need to be understood within the NFL with the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy context of American history, culture, and politics. In this way, (CTE), one thing holds true: Sports matter and are a part of the resilience and perseverance demonstrated by athletes like our national conversation. the jockey Isaac Murphy, the boxer Jack Johnson, the baseball I recognize the sensitivity surrounding the American flag player Jackie Robinson, the football player Marion Motley, and controversy is significant. It should be; it’s important. Unforof course Earl Campbell are recognizable as acts of resistance, tunately, outside of sports and entertainment venues, African similar to the protest by Colin Kaepernick.

Americans are still perceived of as “the problem” with what As a result, with every victory on the racetrack, every is wrong with America. While not new, blackness continues knockout in the boxing ring, every stolen base on the baseball to be criminalized, and as a result African American males diamond, and every touchdown on the football field, they are seen as suspects before they are prospects. Categorically, proved their humanity and manhood. For African American African Americans are invisible as human beings in the boys and men, these superheroes provide life lessons that country built with the sweat equity and blood sacrifices of can be shared in the continued struggle for their humanity. their ancestors. From this standpoint, it would make sense to And they offer a glimpse of a kind of freedom available stage a protest at a moment, and in a venue, where everyone through sports.—Pellom McDaniels III in the world can see you. Former San Francisco Forty-NinWINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

3 3

3 34 4

EE M MO OR R YY M MA AG GA A ZZ II N N EE

W W II N N TT EE RR 22 0 0 11 99

A LU M N I STO R I E S

W W II N N TT EE RR 22 0 0 11 99

EE M MO OR R YY M MA AG GA A ZZ II N N EE

3 3 5 5

Stillwell got an inside look at military espionage before resigning from the army to marry Glenn Reed in 1945.

There was no dormitory for women, so she commuted the two miles to campus. Tuition was $60 per quarter. She aspired to go to Emory Medical School, though she was aware that women were “few and far between” in the medical profession.

“I felt academically capable of doing it,” Stillwell says, “and my mother thought it was great.”

Stillwell displayed a knack for French and German in addition to her aptitude for science and math. Unbeknownst to her, she fit the template almost perfectly for military recruiters searching for women with code-breaking potential.

Stillwell met Glenn Reed, her husband-to-be, on the steps of the Emory at Oxford Science Building. She describes him as her “first and only love.” Reed planned to go to the Emory Dental School. They wanted to marry and believed—unrealistically, Stillwell admits in retrospect—that she could go to medical school while Reed was in dental school. Their parents believed them to be too young and discouraged the idea of marriage. For the time being, she and Glenn acceded to their wishes.

This posed a quandary for Stillwell.

When she graduated from Emory at Oxford in December 1944, Reed was in dental school and she put her dream of medical school on hold. What to do in the meantime?

Stillwell’s “adventuresome” mother came up with an interim plan. She had seen an ad in an Atlanta newspaper about jobs in Washington, D.C., for women. The pay was good, Stillwell recalls.

She answered the ad and was invited to an interview at a downtown Atlanta hotel.

Her father drove her the thirty-five miles to the interview, where several women waited in the lobby, all serious and a bit anxious. The interviewer was an officer in the US Army Signal Corps, polite and professional. He questioned Stillwell mostly about her Emory at Oxford transcript. He revealed nothing about the work Stillwell would be doing in Washington if she was lucky enough to be hired. Nor did he mention that the army would do a background check to determine whether she might be a security risk.

This would not have been a worry to Stillwell, since, as she says, “there would

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

3 7

not have been much to find out about an eighteen-year-old girl from Covington, Georgia.” She remembers being “pretty calm during the interview” and “thinking I had a good chance at getting the job.”

Her instincts were correct. A couple of weeks later, Stillwell got the exciting news: She was hired. She can’t remember whether she received a phone call, a telegram, or a letter. But she was told to report to Arlington Hall Station in Virginia. She was about to leave Covington and home for the first time.

When Stillwell boarded the train for Washington on January 8, 1945, all she carried was one suitcase. She bid a stoic farewell to her parents; no tears were shed. Her father gave her enough cash to cover room and board until her first paycheck. The atmosphere on the train was overwhelming, nothing like the sedate train rides Stillwell had taken as a younger girl to visit relatives in Tennessee and West Virginia. The Pullman sleeping car was crowded and very loud. Soldiers moved about everywhere.

People sat in the aisles. The only privacy was minimal—the curtain of her sleeping berth. She occupied the lower bunk and a stranger slept in the bunk above her.

Stillwell can’t remember whether her roommate was a man or a woman, but, she says, “It was wartime, and people didn’t complain.”

Stillwell arrived in Washington the following afternoon. Cavernous Union Station teemed with people; she remembers looking up with awe at the ornate,

38

EMORY MAGAZINE

vaulted ceilings of the central waiting area. Her immediate concern was to find housing near Arlington Hall Station, where she was to report the next day.

She found her way to the housing desk, where a “very kind woman” told Stillwell about a room and gave her an address and a phone number. Stillwell called ahead to confirm the availability of the room and thereafter was on her own. The weather was cold and she quickly realized that her knee-length coat was too light. She took a bus across the Potomac to Arlington, Virginia, and got off at a stop which, to her dismay, was more than a mile from the rooming house. Hungry, tired, and getting colder by the minute, Stillwell was fearful that a taxi might be too expensive.

Suitcase in hand, Stillwell trudged the entire distance, reaching the rooming house just before dark. There she got yet another dose of wartime reality.

The private room that she hoped for was reserved for married couples. Stillwell had to share a room with a young woman from Minnesota, also a newcomer to Washington. Though she got along “okay” with her surprise roommate, Stillwell was later relieved to get a private room at the Arlington Farms complex, which was the largest of the government homes for the many women who flocked to the national capital during World War II. Arlington Farms was labeled “Girl Town” by a writer for the Washington Post, but among its residents, it was known wryly as “No Man’s Land.”

WINTER 2019

Even after reporting for duty, Stillwell was kept in the dark about Arlington Hall Station’s code-breaking mission.

By some accounts, the existence of the Signal Intelligence Service was never publicly acknowledged. Security was extremely tight. During orientation, Stillwell took a series of tests and performed exceptionally well. She learned that she would be a cryptographer and received top secret clearance. She was told not to discuss the nature of her work with anyone, including coworkers.

Almost immediately, Stillwell set about decoding Japanese message intercepts.

“I was so young to have that much responsibility,” she says. The fighting in the Pacific was “rough” in early 1945 and everyone was worried that Japan would have to be invaded.

The work was grinding and roundthe-clock. Thousands of Japanese intercepts came in daily. Stillwell was on duty six days a week, often taking the swing shift, 4:00 p.m. to midnight. The tools of the job were simple: a pencil, sheets of paper, and captured Japanese code books. The challenge was to figure out which code book applied to the intercept, then convert the message into the format used by the Japanese to read it.

Army translators took over from there, sending the message in English to the appropriate commands in the Pacific.

Avani Wildani, Emory assistant professor of mathematics and computer science, says the work would have been “very tedious.”

“The most famous World War II codes, including the Enigma codes from Imitation Game and the Japanese Purple Machine, encode and decode phrases based on a machine that rotated through letters to perform a substitution and a shared secret key that was passed regularly to operators,” Wildani explains.

“Rotor-based codes are only as strong as the key phrase, which itself needs to be passed around secretly. Today, we use the fact that large prime numbers are hard to factor to avoid having to rely on key phrases.”

In the 1940s, Wildani says, computing was considered women’s work.

“In fact, the term ‘computer’ originally referred to women who did calculations for scientific and financial projects,” Wildani says. “One way to break codes like these is to simply try every option and lock down what makes sense. The army sought out, specifically, women who were good at crossword puzzles for code work.”

Stillwell and her fellow code breakers were keenly aware that the safety of the servicemen in the Pacific depended on the quality and timeliness of their work. Occasionally, their supervisors— all men—would share fully decoded intercepts with them so they could see how much their work mattered. “I felt a sense of pride,” Stillwell recalls.

As you might expect, the women at Arlington Farms were a magnet for the many young servicemen in Washington. But that was not for Stillwell, who read in her spare time and corresponded faithfully with her family and her beloved Reed, in his first year of dental school at Emory.

In April 1945, Reed came to Washington to see Stillwell. She has vivid memories of his visit. His train was the last one to depart Atlanta before President Roosevelt’s funeral cortege passed through. Against that sober backdrop, the couple decided to marry.

Stillwell recognized that she could not go to medical school while Reed was in dental school and accepted the fact that she would never become a doctor.

She resigned her position at Arlington Station effective April 30, 1945, and returned home to marry Reed that June.

Stillwell never told anyone about her code-breaking stint in Washington until after VJ Day in August of 1945. She is still not sure whether the revelation to Reed and her family was permissible.

The couple had a happy life together with three daughters, two of whom graduated from Emory. At ninety-two, Stillwell says she has no regrets.

“I’m especially thankful,” she says, “that the women who served as code breakers during World War II are now gaining recognition for their contributions to victory.”

Thanks to a recent book by Liza Mundy, the patriotic service of WWII women who worked for military intelligence is getting some long-overdue attention.

Mundy’s Code Breakers is helping to bring those contributions to light. But the book also laments the fact that most of those ten thousand women never got the credit they deserved in the years after the war—nor did they receive opportunities to continue the important work and the new lives they had begun.

Marriage and family were the deal-breakers for many of them. “For a woman with children, there were few resources to make a career feasible,” Mundy writes. “The nation lost talent that the war had developed. The 1950s and 1960s would not bring another critical mass of women to succeed the wartime code breakers, and in the 1970s and 1980s, women at the NSA would have to fight a battle for recognition and parity all over again.”

Women still struggle for equal status in the math and science fields. Formal programs like Emory’s Initiative to Maximize Student Development are deliberate efforts to diversify the pipeline to STEM careers—in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Wildani started on the STEM path when she got her first computer at three years old. But it hasn’t been an easy ride.

“As an undergraduate, I would have felt more comfortable if there had been more women in the room,” Wildani admits. “I was the only female in most of my computer science classes.”

Her current research focuses on the problem of data storage—the widening gap between the volume of digital information and the secure space available.

She also has developed a website to highlight important research by women working in computer science.

“I think it’s important to make it clear that women are not just asking for equality, but leading teams, doing impressive science, and getting results,” Wildani says. “The default assumption for women is that you’re not competent.

You have to prove yourself.”

Happily for both Wildani and Jean Stillwell, they already have.

Al Pearson is an Atlanta attorney and writer.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

3 9

E D U CAT I O N I N N OVAT I O N

r w G O

NG

by MARIA M. LAMEIRAS

KNoWlEdGE

p h o t o g r a p h y b y K AY H I N T O N

N AN UNSEASONABLY warm mid-October

afternoon, Daniel Parson strolled through the fields at the Oxford College Organic Farm, pointing out interesting varieties of vegetables—including the delectably named North Georgia Candy Roaster winter squash—and recalling the series of events that brought him to this place in the sun.

Parson runs the Oxford Organic Farm, an eleven-acre piece of land adjacent to the campus that provides produce for the university’s dining halls and farmer’s markets and unique learning opportunities for students.

Although the farm is only a few years old, the land has a long Oxford history.

The property was purchased in 1948 by iconic Oxford figures Marshall and Fran Elizer. Marshall Elizer held various teaching and administrative roles from 1946 to 1978, and Fran Elizer served as library assistant. The Elizers lived on the property until 2004, when Oxford alumnus Trulock Dickson 72Ox 74C purchased the property, assuring them they could return at any time.

After Marshall Elizer passed away in 40

EMORY MAGAZINE

2009 and Fran Elizer in 2011, Dickson donated the property to Oxford.

Emeritus Oxford Sociology Professor Mike McQuaide, who retired last year, spearheaded a feasibility study that showed the land could be profitable as an organic farm, and efforts began to transform the property.

Parson joined Oxford in January 2014 with a master’s degree in plant and environmental science from Clemson University and more than a dozen years working in organic farming in Georgia and South Carolina.

It was as an undergraduate biology major at Clemson that Parson recognized the tremendous disconnect between environmental sustainability and traditional agriculture.

WINTER 2019

“We look at nature as wilderness, but we also need things from nature and we need to learn how to get them without destroying it,” says Parson.

When he first took over stewardship of the Oxford Farm property, Parson tested the soil, adding lime and planting cover crops to prepare the land for planting. Now the plantable land is divided into ten quarter-acre blocks that are planted in rotation throughout the seasons, with a “hoop house”—a moveable greenhouse-type structure—that can be used to shield crops to extend the growing season, plus orchard space.

“We’ve had to take a few trees down, but Emory wants to preserve trees.

There’s a zero-loss policy, so whatever we’ve taken down we’ve replaced with fruit trees,” he says.

The Oxford Organic Farm is an important part of the university’s sustainability efforts. Last year it yielded twenty-five thousand pounds of produce that was sold to Emory Dining Services for use in dining halls and at weekly farmer’s markets on the Oxford and Emory campuses, and through a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription program.

dirt y work Oxford student Gratia Sullivan 18Ox unearths a bunch of radishes destined for the campus kitchens and community consumers.

“We work with our customers to choose what we will grow based on what grows best and on customer preference,” Parson says, adding that the farm provides fifty to one hundred pounds of produce to the dining halls per week.

“What we’ve got, they buy, but we want to make sure they can use what we grow.

There are only so many turnips you can serve.”

Parson welcomes the opportunity to grow a variety of produce that is much more diverse than what can be found in the average grocery store.

“We grow about twenty-five different vegetables and around a hundred varietals. I’ve learned many farming and growing techniques, so once you do that, you try all the different ones,” he says.

The farm grows nineteen varieties of tomatoes, sixteen types of greens, ten kinds of peppers, eight varieties of broccoli, seven kinds of carrots, plus beans, cabbage, cucumbers, eggplant, herbs, squash, and potatoes, peas, beets, turnips, okra, and watermelon.

When he is not growing vegetable crops, fields are filled with cover crops

of oats, buckwheat, and clover, beneficial for the beehives Parson keeps on the property, as well as legumes to conserve soil nutrients and grasses as a habitat for helpful insects.

This year Parson grew a variety of African squash from seeds brought to him from Zaire by a colleague and heirloom sweet potatoes shared by a farmer at the South Carolina Botanical Garden.

“If you are going to grow something, you may as well grow something with flavor,” he says.

Equally important are the education-

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

4 1

al opportunities the farm provides students at Oxford and Emory, who provide much of the farm’s labor.

Sixteen student workers devote their work-study hours on the farm each week, some on the farm as a course requirement, and others as volunteers just for fun.

“We try to match the seasons with when students are on campus so our work-study students who are here every day have the best experience possible and so we can work with faculty to connect course curriculum to the farm,” says Parson, whose official title is farmer-educator. “For economics classes I might talk about how we set prices and interact with markets, but for other classes I may just be talking about the experiences I’ve had and how that connects with what they are discussing in class.”

In her Principles of Microeconomics class at Oxford College, Teresa Romano explains the concepts of perfect competition, market structure, monopoly, oligopoly, and more, teasing out how producers, sellers, and buyers all influence the economic market.

Then, near semester’s end, she takes her students out to the Oxford Organic Farm to get a glimpse at how it all works in the real world.

“We are so used to thinking about economics from a market perspective, but this gives the producer perspective on policies and what effect that can have when applied to smaller farms,” Romano says. “Students come out of the experience knowing on a deeper level how farmers interact with distributors and consumers and how prices, tariffs, and agricultural policy have an impact on the market. It helps them to connect the theoretical concepts we talk about in class with something that is nearby and accessible.”

Michael Martin, a lecturer in Biology at Oxford, integrates concepts of organic farming into his Introduction to Environmental Studies course.

Fall semester marked the second time Martin incorporated farm-based lessons into the class, homing in on particular 42

EMORY MAGAZINE

environmental issues students are able to observe in action at the farm.

“Food and agriculture are a big part of how we interact with the environment, so the farm provides this classroom that is much better at demonstrating the impact of farming than a traditional classroom,” Martin says. “We can discuss issues around water use, soil nutrients and erosion, and pesticides and runoff as water pollutants in class, but we can also walk down to the farm and Daniel can show us what he is doing and what is really working. The realm of application is usually separated from academics, so it is nice to have the real-world application for these kinds of lessons.”

During high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Emory junior Eden Nitza 18Ox worked at a zoo, an experience that ignited her interest in conservation biology. Her job as a work-study student and intern at the Oxford Organic Farm helped her grasp how integral sustainable and organic farming methods are to saving species from extinction.

“I came into Oxford wanting to do conservation science, but more on the wildlife population side. I want to help prevent species from going extinct, but the piece I didn’t understand is how important agriculture is to that. A major reason some species are going extinct is because of deforestation due to agriculture,” says Nitza, a biology major. “There is a people aspect to how we are going to prevent extinction in these species. That is not telling the farmers where they can and can’t farm, but working with them to come up with ways to farm and coexist with wildlife.”

Nitza began working on the farm in September of her first year and spent all four semesters of her time at Oxford as a work-study student or intern at the farm. Prior to that experience, she says she was a “passive” supporter of organic farming, but did not fully appreciate the impact of sustainable agriculture on the environment.

“Learning about the importance of integrated pest management and how to reduce water loss by drip irrigation

WINTER 2019

the constant gardener Bringing both education and experience, Daniel Parson (above) has made the Oxford Organic Farm blossom into both a source of fresh food and an outdoor classroom. He relies heavily on help from students like Celine Kong 20Ox (right, top) and Tommy Kreutz 20Ox (right, bottom).

“f

YOU ARE GOING TO GROW SOMETHING, YOU MAY AS WELL GROW SOMETHING W I T H F L AV O R .”

versus spray irrigation teaches the value of sustainable methods better than a textbook can,” she says.

While there are natural avenues to explore the correlation between the operation of the farm and environmental science or economics classes, assistant professor of philosophy Joshua Mousie embraced the challenge to connect the farm to his environmental philosophy class. Students complete a philosophy of food project that involves reading materials on the ethics of animal and food production, globally and in the United States, then volunteering at the Oxford Organic Farm to participate in organized food production on a small scale.

“Students synthesize their experience on the farm with the readings to reflect their own philosophy of food, responding to authors we’ve read, to give their take on the most ethical forms of food production,” Mousie says.

In getting to know Parson, Mousie also discovered the farmer-scholar’s personal interest in philosophy.

“Daniel hosted us for a classroom session in the barn. We read texts and Daniel added his expertise to those conversations,” Mousie says. “Students were able to ask more pointed questions about how an organic farm functions differently from an industrial farm and the goals of ethical farming in small organic settings.”

Students—some of whom have never visited a farm of any kind—have been enthusiastic about the experience.

“I think some of them will never look at food in the grocery store the same way again,” Mousie says. “Once they have to go and do some of that labor themselves, it helps them think about why that sometimes costs so much more.

People get separated from the processes that gets produce to the stores, and this is their moment to see that firsthand.

It leads to more careful consideration and more conversation about the local and environmental impacts farming practices have on the ecosystem and its inhabitants. It’s sort of an ‘aha’ moment for students.”

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

4 3

the bees’ knees Beekeeping is an important part of sustainable agriculture at the Oxford farm.

The farm wasn’t up and running by the time Ruth Geiger 11Ox 13C 15MPH graduated from Oxford, but a 2015 visit to Oxford to meet with sociology professor Mike McQuade—who was instrumental in founding the farm—led to a tour of the property and an opportunity for Geiger.

“At that time I was increasingly interested in the production side of food.

I’d been studying public nutrition (in the Department of Global Health at the Rollins School of Public Health) and working with resettled refugees in Atlanta and connecting them with agriculture,” she says. She learned on that visit that there was an open position for a farm apprentice, so she applied. Geiger’s academic background in public health seemed a natural fit to Parson.

“I see food as social justice. We are in

a food desert in Newton County, where there is very little access to fresh food.

We know farmers here who have no outlet to sell what they grow, and they have to feed their families, so the food is all going into Atlanta,” Geiger says. “The farm here at Oxford is well poised to meet that need. We are a natural conduit for a relationship with the community and we are looking into how to increase access to fresh food for lower-income populations in Newton County.”

Geiger also has created a field trip program with a local elementary school to bring third-graders to the farm to learn about organic farming.

“It is important for all children to learn where their food is coming from,” she says. “It is also our mission to educate first- and second-year college students, and we are helping accom-

YO U R G I F T SU P P O RTS O U R G ROW T H Oxford College offers students a unique educational experience. To help future students share it, visit emory.edu/home/giving/where-to-give/oxford.

44

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

plish that mission by educating our college students on how to educate third-grade students.”

Aside from the backyard chickens and plants he tended with his mother at his family’s suburban Houston, Texas, home, sophomore Chad Coffey 19Ox 21C had no farming experience. After he was accepted to Oxford, he discovered the organic farm online and knew he wanted to be involved before he even set foot on campus.

The community of student workers and the opportunities they’ve had to explore and pursue ideas and projects at the farm have been formative for Coffey.

“It’s more than picking vegetables and learning how an organic farm works, and more than the social aspect, though I’ve met my closest friends working on the farm,” Coffey says.

He and another intern help Geiger with the field trip program by planning educational activities and making proposals for new projects at the farm that can be used for education.

“I’m working to get a chicken coop approved as a learning tool,” says Coffey, who plans to major in business.

“Through the internship, you definitely have to adhere to a budget, be in a leadership role, and take charge of projects without being told what to do. It’s a good learning opportunity.”

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E

ALUMNI NEWS AND CLASS NOTES

P H O T O G R A P H Y A L J O H N G AV I O L A

FEMALE FORWARD

Amy Sterner Nelson 02C creates shared work spaces designed to help women explore their potential for success and leadership

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

4 5

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E

Pulling Through BRYCE CARLSON MERRILY ROWED HIS WAY RIGHT INTO THE RECORD BOOKS

A

rower since high school, Bryce Andrew Carlson 11G coached crew on Emory’s campus for three seasons. When he’s not in his Cincinnati classroom teaching biology to high school kids, Carlson continues to indulge his love for adventure— running ultramarathons and recently setting a new speed record for a westto-east solo and unsupported crossing of the North Atlantic. Rowing solo from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to St. Mary’s Harbor in the Isles of Scilly, England, he became the first American to make the two-thousand-mile journey and crushed the previous world record by more than fifteen days, arriving in thirty-eight days, six hours, and forty-nine minutes.

FIRST ONE ON THE DISNEY RIDE Roshani Chokshi 13C, New York Times best-selling author of young adult fantasies including The Star-Touched Queen and A Crown of Wishes, credits her success to her classmates at Emory. “I’m grateful that Emory surrounded me with exceptional people, because it cured me of narcissism very quickly,” says Chokshi. “If someone had told me I was the best writer in class, I’d be writing depressing, midlife-crisis, suburbia literary fiction.”

Instead, she is the first signed author to the newly launched imprint—a kind of subdivision under the Disney umbrella brand—spearheaded by middle-grade fiction legend Rick Riordan of Percy Jackson fame. Her latest, Aru Shah and the End of Time, will launch Rick Riordan Presents, a series focusing on mythological adventures from non-Western cultures. “You guys have been asking about a Percy Jackson-esque take on Hindu mythology, and let me tell you, Rosh does it better than I ever could,” Riordan writes on his website. “Aru Shah is a smart and salty middle school girl who just wants to impress her snooty private school friends. She takes them on a tour of the Indian American Museum her mom curates, where her friends dare her to do the one thing she is forbidden to do: Light an ancient lamp that will supposedly start the end of the world.”

46

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

PHOTOG R APHY SU B M IT TED BY SU BJ ECTS

WRITER GETS A HIGH-PROFILE GIG WITH RICK RIORDAN

EMORY KEEPS ON CARING SERVICE DAY MOBILIZES THE COMMUNITY YEAR AFTER YEAR

VEGGING OUT Young alumni tend gardens at the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture.

ALL IN GOOD FUN Emory alumni, students, and families celebrated together on October 20 as Homecoming 2018 culminated in a festival and concert on the Quad.

The fifteenth-annual Emory Cares International Service Day on November 10 drew more than one thousand registrants in fifty cities and seven countries around the world. Students, alumni, faculty, staff, and their families volunteered to help with dozens of community projects—from landscaping parks to packing meals—including more than twenty in the Atlanta area.

Founded in 2003, the popular annual tradition is a partnership between the Emory Alumni Association and Volunteer Emory.

HOMECOMING 2018

P H O T O G R A P H Y H O M E C O M I N G : S T E P H E N N O W L A N D ; E M O R Y C A R E S : K AY H I N TO N

ALUMNI RETURN FOR PARADE AND FESTIVITIES

CAMPUS MIXER Students and their families (bottom left) visiting for Family Weekend joined returning alumni (top left) for Homecoming activities in October, including academic sessions, tours, reunion celebrations, networking, a Town Hall with President Claire E. Sterk, games, food, music, and reconnecting with friends. Emory Alumni Board member Steve Greenfield 04EvMBA (right) hypes up the crowd before the Homecoming concert featuring alumna, singer, songwriter, and actress Keri Hilson 03Ox.

Save the Date Join us for Emory Homecoming 2019, October 25 to 27.

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

4 7

ROOM TO GROW

P H O T O G R A P H Y A L J O H N G AV I O L A

I

A PERSONAL MISSION INSPIRED A NEW BRAND OF WOMEN-FRIENDLY CO-WORKING SPACES

n January 2017, Amy Sterner Nelson 02C left her job as a corporate attorney to launch the Riveter, a “femaleforward” co-working space in Seattle.

She says the idea hit her when she was looking for her own place to start a business. Response to the concept has been strong since the first space opened in May 2017.

In March, Nelson’s company secured $4.7 million in a financing deal that will allow the Riveter to open a third Seattle location and two new spaces in Los Angeles, with plans for expansion to Dallas and Denver. This is the first push in expanding the brand nationwide, says Nelson.

“We are working with Madrona Venture Group, which put the first money into Amazon and Redfin and Rover.

It’s very exciting,” says Nelson, who spent ten years as a corporate attorney in New York, served on President Barack Obama’s National Finance Committee, and worked as a consultant for The Carter Center. “I’ve always been involved in and interested in moving women ahead in leadership. As a lawyer and in politics, I saw a world where you start with an equal number of women in the workforce, but you did not end up with an equal number of women in leadership positions.”

Although the concept was designed with women in mind, about 20 percent of the Riveter’s clients are men.

“There are a lot of men out there who are very interested in the cause of moving women ahead in leadership,” Nelson says. “From a broader level, if you want to make a change for women in the workplace, you have to include men.

Women have been working in spaces designed by and for men for many years, it’s not too much of a stretch to have men working in a space designed by and for women.”

Even being able to attract funding for the business is part of the positive change Nelson hopes to effect.

“Of all the venture capital invested, only 2 percent goes to businesses started by women and 98 percent to businesses started by men. Those are some pretty stark differences,” she says. “Actually, when I came up with the idea for the Riveter, I thought I’d just build one, but a male colleague said, ‘Why would you build one when you could build one hundred? If women everywhere need this, why don’t you build a hundred?’ That conversation was interesting because it goes to the heart of how men and women view the world differently,” Nelson says.

The mother of three daughters—Sloane, three; Reese, two; and Merritt, one—Nelson said becoming a parent sharpened her interest in opening her own business and enabling other women to do the same.

“As a mother in corporate America, I saw that the systems were not put in place to help women stay in the

professional arena and move ahead in their careers,” says Nelson, citing a statistic from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: 43 percent of highly trained professional women leave the workforce when they have children.

Nelson sought out professional development classes on how to do financial projections and pitch ideas—many of them offered in co-working spaces.

“When I walked in, it really struck me how the majority of members were men and the spaces were designed for a male-forward community,” she says. “There were women in these spaces, but they were designed with ping-pong tables and foosball and kegs. It didn’t feel like a place where a working mother in her mid-thirties could find the community and resources and skills she needs. I wondered where women entrepreneurs went to talk to each other.”

Starting with her own circle of female colleagues, Nelson began seeking input about the ideal environment for a professional community created by women.

“One of the buckets we focused on is women who are pivoting back into work after taking time to be with their children or taking care of their parents,” she says. “These are women who have had incredible careers, so why is there a lack of confidence when they go back into the arena?

Some employers react as if these women never worked a day in their lives. We are finding ways to bring those women back into the workforce when and how they want.”—Maria M. Lameiras

ONLY

2% OF VENTURE

CAPITAL INVESTMENT

GOES TO WOMEN-

OWNED BUSINESSES

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

4 9

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E / A LU M N I I N K

FROM THE HEART: Looking back through

Whitaker calls into question the presumed nat-

This act inspired a group of gifted artists, the

his nearly forty-year career, cardiovascular

ural foundation for social inequalities and sheds

Affrilachian Poets, to begin working together

surgeon and Emory distinguished professor

light on both the constraints and possibilities

and using their writing to defy persistent stereo-

Omar Lattouf 74C 77G 80M 85MR 88MR vividly

inherent in the human condition.

types of Appalachia as a racially and culturally homogenized region. In Black Bone: 25 Years of

recounts his experiences as a heart surgeon from his education and residency training

MIND AND SPIRIT: With her first book,

the Affrilachian Poets, author Jeremy D. Paden

through later years as an independent surgeon

Psychosis or Mystical Religious Experience?

04PhD offers a collection of both new and clas-

in Heartfelt Stories: The Life of a Heart Surgeon.

A New Paradigm Grounded in Psychology and

sic work and features submissions from Frank X

Lattouf, who dedicated himself to providing

Reformed Theology, author Susan L. DeHoff

Walker, Nikky Finney, Gerald Coleman, Crystal

care to patients suffering from numerous

95T presents a new paradigm for distinguishing

Wilkinson, Kelly Norman Ellis, and many others.

cardiac aliments, reflects on the hardships and

psychotic and mystical religious experiences.

triumphs of his career. Lattouf will donate all

In order to explore how Presbyterian pastors

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE: Many people

proceeds from the book to support cardiovas-

differentiate such events, DeHoff draws from

want stronger marriages, but few know how

cular education and patient care.

Reformed theology, psychological theory,

to create them. This dilemma is at the crux of

and robust qualitative research to present a

The Marriage Counseling Workbook: 8 Steps to a

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER: Edited by Gregory

new paradigm considering the similarities,

Strong and Lasting Relationship by author Emily

McBrayer 01C, this book contains new, anno-

differences, and possible overlap of psychotic

Tingling Cook 08C. In her private marriage coun-

tated, and literal yet accessible translations of

and mystical religious experiences. DeHoff is

seling practice, Cook helps couples pinpoint

the Greek philosopher, historian, soldier, and

a transition pastor at Whitinsville Presbyterian

the cause of their troubles and recreate a deep,

mercenary Xenophon’s eight shorter writings.

Church, a pastoral counselor with AAPC Fellow,

lasting connection. The Marriage Counseling

The writings are accompanied by interpretive

and a visiting scholar at Boston University.

Workbook offers step-by-step marriage counseling exercises for learning to talk about the tough

essays, including one by McBrayer, that reveal these works to be masterful achievements by

WHAT’S IN THE BOX: Deliverability is the art

issues and build ongoing skills for healthy com-

a serious thinker of the first rank who raises

and science of getting emails into the inbox. In

munication, providing the tools and support to

important moral, political, and philosophical

Deliverability Inferno: Helping Email Marketers

achieve a stronger, healthier marriage.

questions. By bringing together Xenophon’s

Understand the Journey from Purgatory to

shorter writings, this volume aims to help those

Paradise, author Christopher L. Arrendale 99Ox

MERRY? HAPPY? The rate of interfaith mar-

interested in Xenophon to better understand

01C of Atlanta explains the ins and outs of get-

riage in the United States has risen so radically

the core of his thought, political as well as phil-

ting your marketing emails into your recipient’s

since the sixties that it is difficult to recall

osophical. McBrayer is assistant professor of

Inbox. The book dives deep into multiple areas

how taboo the practice once was. Drawing on

political science and director of core curriculum

of email deliverability including bounces, com-

ethnographic and historical sources, Beyond

at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio.

plaints, spam traps, content, authentication,

Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith

compliance, and promises to teach marketers

Family in the United States author Samira K.

ONLY HUMAN: In The Trouble with Human

how to better deliver emails to the major ISPs,

Mehta 13PhD provides a fascinating analysis of

Nature, author Elizabeth Dixon Whitaker

network filters, and mailbox providers.

wives, husbands, children, and their extended families in interfaith homes; religious leaders;

95PhD brings together biological and crosscultural evidence to critically examine common

BONE DEEP: The Appalachian region stretches

and the social and cultural milieu surrounding

preconceptions and challenge popular assump-

from Mississippi to New York, encompassing

mixed marriages among Jews, Catholics, and

tions about human nature. The book sets out to

rural areas as well as cities from Birmingham

Protestants. Mehta argues that the emergence

counter genetic and evolutionary myths about

to Pittsburgh. Though Appalachia’s people

of multiculturalism helped generate new terms

human variation and behavior, drawing on both

are as diverse as its terrain, few other regions

by which interfaith families felt empowered to

biological and cultural anthropology, as well as

in America are as burdened with stereo-

shape their lived religious practices in ways

disciplines including psychology, economics,

types. Author Frank X Walker coined the term

and degrees previously unknown, intertwining

and sociology. Chapters address the interre-

“Affrilachia” to give identity and voice to peo-

religious identities without compromising their

lated topics of health and disease, gender and

ple of African descent from this region and to

social standing.

other differences, and violence and conflict.

highlight Appalachia’s multicultural identity.

50

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

GET READY TO

GO ALL IN! February 6–7, 2019

JOIN US FOR EMORY’S

DAY OF GIVING ALLIN.EMORY.EDU

WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

5 3

MENTORSHIP IS THE KEY TO ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS At Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, small businesses elevate our communities with the right support. Through our Start:ME program, an accelerator for promising small businesses in metro Atlanta, we connect entrepreneurs to the knowledge, networks, and capital they need to thrive. In 5 years, we’ve brought together hundreds of mentors and aspiring business owners across the Clarkston, East Lake/Kirkwood, and Southside communities, ensuring more than 150 new ventures are equipped with relationships to fuel their success.

“Start:ME adds more value and benefit for entrepreneurs than thousands of dollars worth of paid business consulting.

The program not only equips entrepreneurs for the real world, but cheers them on and motivates them to confidently progress in the journey of building their businesses. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience as a mentor!”

JONATHAN PASCUAL TAPROOM COFFEE & BEER, CLARKSTON MENTOR HOW CAN YOU HELP AS A START:ME MENTOR?

EQUIP

ADVISE

ENTREPRENEURS WITH YOUR VALUABLE BUSINESS INSIGHTS

ENTREPRENEURS ON WAYS TO ENHANCE THEIR BUSINESS PLANS

IN 2019, MAKE A

CONNECT

ENTREPRENEURS TO NETWORKS THAT CAN HELP THEM SUCCEED

BIG GIFT TO SMALL BUSINESSES - VOLUNTEER TO MENTOR

STARTMEATL.ORG/MENTORS WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

5 7

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E / C L ASS N OT E S

A Goizueta MBA puts education into action. By marrying classroom academics with active learning, we offer learning experiences that go beyond our four walls into Atlanta, across the country, and around the globe.

The result? Educated business thinkers and exceptional problem-solvers.

A one-two punch for today’s reality…and tomorrow’s possibilities.

Explore our MBA options for working professionals and begin changing your perspective as early as Fall 2019.

EVENING MBA | WEEKEND EXECUTIVE MBA | MODULAR EXECUTIVE MBA EMORY.BIZ/WP 58

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E / C O DA

E

mory students hail from all over the world, bringing with them their own diverse cultures and identities.

The Class of 2020 alone includes students from forty-eight states and seventy-eight countries, according to the Emory News Center. Some students are thousands of miles away from home, and some are experiencing a culture completely alien to their own.

I didn’t travel thousands of miles for move-in day, and I’ve never had to hop on a thirteen-hour plane ride to return home. I came to Emory from a small town in East Tennessee, about 270 miles from Atlanta. While I expected a rough transition from living in a town with a population of a little under four thousand to a bustling metropolitan area like Atlanta, the “Emory bubble” made the adjustment as easy as could be. Emory’s campus and the surrounding residential neighborhood acted as a barrier to most of the city during my freshman and sophomore years, and I found that the “hey y’all” and sweet tea culture held true across the Tennessee-Georgia border.

Unlike many of my peers, I found very few cultural differences between my hometown and my new home, except for one: how little everyone cared about football.

To my first-year self, this was more than just a shock; it was a nightmare. Of course, I knew coming into Emory that there was no football team. Every Emory student has had a good laugh over the “Emory Football: Still Undefeated” shirts displayed proudly in the bookstore. Still, I arrived on campus with the assumption that, like me, everyone else viewed the lack of a football team as a flaw they were willing to overlook for the sake of Emory’s multitude of positive attributes.

60

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2019

By Presley West 20C

This naive assumption was quickly put to rest. Rather than moping over having no team to cheer on, people spent their Saturdays partying, volunteering in Atlanta, catching up on sleep, or running a 5K. It was strange to me at first, as someone who grew up in a region where football is followed and practiced in a borderline religious fashion; a majority of my town’s population showed up for Friday night high school games, and those lucky enough to afford season tickets drove the hour and a half down I-75 to Neyland Stadium to watch the Tennessee Volunteers play on Saturdays. It wasn’t until I came to Emory that I even realized how much of my time, money, and energy was spent on tailgating, traveling to games, and cheering on my favorite teams.

Embracing Emory’s undefeated spirit, I made a choice to stop wishing for a football team and to start focusing on exploring all that Emory and Atlanta had to offer.

As a third-year student now, I realize that I’ll never have the time, money, or energy to explore ALL that Emory and Atlanta have to offer—but I’m still trying. From Greek life to the Emory Globe, I’ve found my home on campus through organizations that I’m passionate about. From the Fox Theatre to Music Midtown, I’ve hit up mainstay Atlanta staples, and from Thaicoon to La Parilla, I’ve even found my own niche favorites.

If Emory had a football team, I think it’s safe to say I would have skipped out on all of the amazing experiences that have made my time at Emory so memorable. But that isn’t to say that I’ve given up my love for football. I still stream the big SEC games on my laptop, and I even took four of my best friends from college on a visit to my hometown that culminated in a game at Neyland Stadium.

This year, the balance I’ve struck between my interests has come full circle, with football’s biggest stars headed to Emory’s backyard in February for Superbowl LIII. And though Emory doesn’t have a football team, the university’s deep involvement through research, alumni involvement, and health care with Superbowl LIII shows that Emory recognizes and appreciates football’s value in the American cultural sphere, despite what I may have thought when I arrived on campus as a green freshman.

I no longer find myself wishing for a football team at Emory. I’ve found that the absence of football at Emory isn’t a necessary evil, but rather an added bonus that has allowed me to explore other interests that I never would have considered had I spent my Saturdays painted up in blue and gold and cheering on the sidelines. Still, I am proud of my university’s involvement with the largest football event of the year—and I’m looking forward to what’s to come.

I L L U S T R AT I O N J A S O N R A I S H

Time on the Clock

This is my legacy.

Cecelia D. Ferman 65C and James L. Ferman Jr. 65B The Fermans met as undergraduates and have received the Emory Medal for their faithful service to Emory. Jim Ferman is a second-generation Emory alumnus and member of the Emory Board of Trustees. He is CEO and president of Ferman Motor Car Company, the oldest continually operated family dealership in the United States.

The Fermans are active civic leaders in Tampa.

“BALANCE IS IMPORTANT TO US. Our relationship with Emory has been very close and we have a lot of good memories associated with Emory. We believe that if you’re going to support an institution, you ought to do it through annual giving, capital gifts during a campaign, and by providing sustaining resources through an estate gift. Our planned gift is a balanced way to continue our support for Emory.”

Their estate gift benefits undergraduate education at Emory.

Have you planned your legacy? giftplanning.emory.edu 404.727.8875 WINTER 2019

EMORY MAGAZINE

6 1

Emory University Office of Alumni and Development Records 1762 Clifton Rd., Suite 1400 Atlanta, Georgia 30322

FSC_C101537_Full_–_MIX_Paper_Landscape_BlackOnWhite_r_kh9Y5M.pdf

1

12/10/18

9:55 AM

R E CYC L E M E ! Finished with this issue of Emory Magazine?

Pass along to a friend or colleague!

TEAM PLAYERS Emory’s game day lineup includes Hany Atallah, chief of emergency medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital, where serious injuries would likely be treated during a major public event; Emory Healthcare’s Spero Karas, the Atlanta Falcons’ head team physician, who will be ready to assist if needed; and Dan Gordon, the university president’s chief of staff, who serves on the Super Bowl advisory board.