Emory Magazine / Winter 2014

Winter 2014

B e n F. J o h n s o n I I I 6 5 C

l o o k s ba c k o n a l if e e n t w i n e d w i t h e m o ry ’ s o w n

Steady Hand, Wise Heart

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Cor prudentis possidebit scientiam.

contents

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Vol. 89, number 4

f e at u r e s

20 Steady Hand, Wise Heart Emory has served as a touchstone for Ben F. Johnson III 65C since he was a boy, long before he became chair of the university’s Board of Trustees in 2000. These days he is more likely to be found at nearby deli the General Muir than the Administration Building, but he’s never very far away. B y k i m b e r w i l l i a m s

26 Caffeine Fix Grab a cup of joe and join us for a visit to Nicaragua, where faculty and students from Goizueta Business School are helping organic coffee farmers get what they deserve: a better price for their beans.

By paige parvin 9 6G

32 The Kids Are All Bright They’re synthesizing catalysts and chalcones, producing plays, studying causal illusions, living with monks, and engineering proteins—and these student researchers aren’t even out of college.

B y m a d i s o n l a m pe r t 15C a n d paige parvin 9 6G

40 Beyond Black and White How Emory’s School of Law is walking the walk when it comes to diversity—and why it matters.

By maria lameiras

c o ffee : b r yan cla r k ; wagne r : em o r y ph o t o / v i d e o

oxford outlook 47

welcome to the libr ary

4 8

N i s b e t r e c e i v e s g r e g o r yr ackley award

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profile: julie nelson 95OX 96C

o n l i n e at w w w. e m o r y. e d u/m ag a z i n e s u m m i n g u p President James Wagner welcomed the Emory community to the spring semester with the State of the University address, an eight-minute video that recognizes the contributions of faculty, students, staff, and alumni who worked to make Emory excellent in 2013.

Watch it at www.emory.edu/magazine.

p a i r i n g u p The Healthy Eating Partners program connects students to encourage good habits; see a video at our website. Story page 10.

On the cover: Photo by Parish Kohanim.

g e a r i n g u p Find a video introduction of Sarah Cook 95C, your new leader of the Emory Alumni Association. Story page 54.

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54 EAA Leadership Transition Sarah Cook 95C takes the wheel of the Emory Alumni Association, succeeding Allison Dykes, who has been named vice president and secretary of the university.

5 6 E m o r y M e d a l i s t s 2 0 1 3

of note

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a l u m n i In k

67

Tribute Robert DeHa an

6 8

coda R aising a Tomgirl

health y eating : k ay hint o n ; me d alists : ann b o r d en

register

10 You Going to Eat That?

The new Healthy Eating Partners program pairs older, wiser students with first-years who may be a little too dazzled by the array of dining choices at Emory eateries.

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board of trustees elec ts john morgan 67OX 6 9B a s new chair

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f a c u lt y b o o k c a r r i e wickha m’s the muslim brotherhood

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autism is recognizable in first months, study finds

11 P r o f e s s o r a n t h o n y m artin discovers ancient bird tracks

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office hours Neurologist gregory berns on your d o g’ s brain

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secret lives c assie mitchell 04G 0 9PhD, scientist and p a r a ly m p i c a t h l e t e

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dooley noted the eagle has l anded

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research c a t a ly s t f o r change

2013 Emory Medalist Walter M. "Sonny" Deriso Jr. 68C 72L

Editor Paige P. Parvin 96G paige.parvin@emory.edu Art Director Erica Endicott Production Manager Stuart Turner Contributors Susan Carini 04G Carol Clark Asha French 14PhD Gary Hauk 91PhD Hal Jacobs Holly Korschun Mary Loftus Maria Lameiras Michelle Valigursky Kimber Williams

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Lead Photographer Kay Hinton Copy Editor Jane Howell Advertising Manager David McClurkin 74C

Emory Magazine Editorial Advisory Board Angela Bostick 04MBA Associate Dean, Marketing and Communications, Goizueta Business School

Editorial Intern Madison Lampert 15C

Halli Cohn 90L Member, Emory Alumni Board

Photographers Ann Borden Tom Brodnax 65OX 68C Jack Kearse Bryan Meltz

Sarah Cook 95C 09PH Senior Associate Vice President, Emory Alumni Association

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Vincent Dollard Associate Vice President for Communications, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

Michael Elliott Senior Associate Dean for Faculty, Emory College of Arts and Sciences Steve Fennessy Editor, Atlanta Magazine Hank Klibanoff James M. Cox Jr. Chair in Journalism Rosemary Magee 82PhD Director, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book LIbrary Cathy Wooten Communications Director, Oxford College

Ex Officio Nancy Seideman Interim Vice President, Communications and Marketing Susan Carini 04G Executive Director, Emory Creative Group Allison Dykes Vice President and Secretary of the University Gary Hauk 91PhD Vice President and Deputy to the President

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by Emor y Creative Group, 1762 Clifton Road, Plaza 1000, Atlanta, Georgia 30322. Periodicals posta g e p a i d a t A t l a n t a , G e o rg i a , a n d a d d i t i o na l m a i l i ng of f i c e s .

POSTMASTER: send address changes to O ffice of A lumn i and Development Records, 1762 Clifton Road, Suite 1400, Atlanta, Georgia 30322.

E mor y M a ga zine is dis t r ibute d free to all alumni and to parents of undergraduates, as well as to other friends of the University. Address changes may be sent to the Office of Alumni and Development Records, 1762 Clifton Road, Suite 14 0 0, At l a n t a , G e o rg i a 3 0 32 2 or eurec @ emor y.edu. If you are an individual with a disability and wish to acquire this publication in an alternative format, plea se contac t Paige P. Par vin (address a b o v e ) o r c a l l 4 0 4 . 7 2 7. 7 8 7 3 .

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the big picture

19 Special Guest His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama visited Emory in October, his third appearance as a Presidential Distinguished Professor. And again, he brought his smile. Photo by Kay Hinton.

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Lighting the Torch One of my favorite places in the world is my living room in winter, where there’s usually a fire burning in the fireplace.

I don’t know what it is about a fire that I find so beguiling, but there is something about the glow, the warmth, and the crackle that lures me to sit for hours—reading, drinking coffee (like now) or tea or wine, working (like now), or just daydreaming, staring at the flames as though they’re spinning a story and I might miss the ending if I don’t keep watch.

The other thing about a fire, of course, is that it requires tending. For about three years running, in the fall when it gets cold, I have made a spirited pitch for the installation of gas logs in our fireplace—you know, the kind where you flip a switch and a picturesque fire appears like magic, and when you need to go run errands or cook dinner or walk the dog, you flip it off again and the grate goes dark.

Obviously, this is an argument I have repeatedly lost.

So here I am, jumping up every few minutes to poke at the wood or add another log. Fire building and tending is a skill that does not come particularly easily to me, but I admit I’m secretly happy to have been overruled on the question of gas logs, which are long on convenience but a little shorter on reward.

When I began, earlier today, to read through the nearcomplete issue of Emory Magazine, I was thinking that one of its central themes is passion: a burning drive, focus, and dedication to purpose. We spotlight eleven student researchers (and there are many more) who are so eager to learn and discover that they have pursued complex research projects as undergraduates, achieving concrete outcomes before they even finish college. We meet faculty and students in Goizueta Business School who have formed deep connections in Nicaragua and become so inspired that they’ve launched a socially conscious business, directly marketing and selling coffee with the aim of returning a fair price to the Nicaraguan farmers whom they’ve come to know.

Our cover subject, Ben F. Johnson III 65C, has set an example of steady determination and sound character for most of his life—as a student at Emory and then Harvard, 4

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as an attorney and later managing partner at his top-flight Atlanta firm, as a civic leader, as a husband and father, and as an Emory trustee, chairing the board for the past thirteen years. He is described as unflappable, curious, disciplined, and driven by a passion for public service that “runs in the family bloodline.”

Passion, yes; no one accomplishes this much without devotion to the cause, be it a place, a project, a business, a career, or a belief. But in taking a closer look at these stories, I was struck by another theme: patience.

As a boy, Johnson spent many quiet Saturdays at the office with his dad, then dean of Emory’s School of Law— watching, learning, and as writer Kimber Williams puts it, preparing. The late Ben F. Johnson Jr. 40L had himself been a freshman at Emory before the Depression made his scholarship, and therefore his attendance, impossible; he dropped out and worked at a five-and-dime store, eventually completing his degree at the University of Georgia and then graduating from Emory’s law school. After serving in the navy during World War II, he decided that he wanted to teach others, and joined Emory’s law faculty.

Both father and son seem to have moved through life with unhurried perseverance, guided by an inner compass and motivated not by personal gain or glory, but the nearly opposite desire to tend to the things they cared about— which included Emory. When the elder Johnson helped win the landmark case that effectively allowed African American students to attend private Georgia universities, it gave deserving students the opportunity to shine and created a culture of diversity in the law school that continues today; similarly, Ben Johnson III has said that one of his talents is putting bright people into the right roles and then stepping out of the way, supporting their work from the sidelines.

It’s a philosophy that demands both fortitude and grace—a willingness to nurture what is deemed worthy over time rather than seeking speedy solutions or dramatic triumphs. Much like growing coffee on a farm in Nicaragua, or spending months on a research project with no certainty of success, the Johnsons demonstrate devotion to a grander enterprise and the simple confidence that work in service of progress is often its own reward.

Guiding the destiny of a university is a little like tending a fire. It takes patience, and skill, and an appreciation for authenticity and tradition, and for the enjoyment of basking in its bright, warm glow. It won’t make you rich or famous.

You tend a fire for the pure pleasure of watching its flames dance.—P.P.P.

letters nice to hear that the I was extremely moved arts are coming back to to read Laura Barlament’s “The Emory, at least to some Last Letter” (Coda, autumn degree.

2013). I, too, was privileged to Simone Handlerhave had Max Aue as a profesHutchinson 87C sor for several classes, ranging Morristown, New from a German language Jersey course to my grand finale at Emory, German Literature In spite of from 1750 to 1850, taught by ­President Wagner’s Dr. Aue in Vienna. As a GerEMORY GEORGIA TECH quip about starting man literature major, I was an engineering school one class short of graduating, in the 1880s and not and my last semester was starting another (“Brain Gain,” autumn 2013), spent in Vienna. While the course requirement I needed was not part of the curriculum Emory once offered both BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering. Technically, it was offered, Dr. Aue was so enthusiastic about his not an engineering school, but an engineerfield that he created the necessary German ing department in what was then called the literature class for me. Along with one other College of Arts and Sciences. Professor John student, I met with him in his mother’s bookB. Peebles was chair of the department. If I and music-filled Viennese apartment where, am not mistaken, he joined the Emory faculty over coffee and pastries, we would discuss when the college was still located at Oxford, the works from that era that were playing in before the move to the Druid Hills campus. the theater and opera house in Vienna that The department was closed in 1950, when Prosummer. After our readings and discussions, fessor Peebles retired. The other engineering we would see the works performed. Dr. Aue faculty member at that time was Bob Rohrer, had a deep love for the library in Vienna who happened to also be my brother-in-law. and sent us off on a treasure hunt of sorts, When the engineering department was closed, to find a copy of Nestroy’s Der Bose Geist he went to Duke, got a PhD in physics, and Lupazivagabundis, which required penetratreturned to Emory and taught physics for ing the labyrinthian halls and towers, where many years. I graduated with a BS in engineerI finally discovered the text (only available ing in 1948. There were eighteen in that class, in Gothic German print) inside a porcelain probably the largest class the engineering stove–heated room on the top floor of a turdepartment ever had. The other seventeen ret. When I published my first novel, Vicious were all veterans of WWII, so I was the youngSpring, I included him in the acknowledgeest. Many of the members of the classes of ments. No other person has ever taught me 1949 and 1950 also were veterans. I doubt that so profoundly about literature. I recently there are very many of us left now. It is good finished the first draft of my third novel, and to know that Emory and Georgia Tech are it occurred to me that he would be my ideal combining their resources and skills for both reader to offer feedback. Having been out of research and instruction. touch for a few years, I composed a letter to Baldwin Bridger 48C him in my mind. Then I looked him up online Houston, Texas and was devastated to learn of his untimely death. Barlament’s description of his classes is so evocative, and it brought me some measure I’m currently an MBA student at ­Georgia Tech. I loved the article “Brain of peace to sense how many, many students live on, whose minds he pried further open in Gain” about the relationship between Emory and Tech, and I agree that the relationship his congenial way.

Hollis Hampton-Jones 87C between the two schools is healthily symbiNashville, Tennessee otic. I would like to point out one other way in which the schools are deeply integrated: the TI:GER Program. The program is a collabora[“Portrait of the Artist,” autumn tion between Georgia Tech and Emory PhDs 2013, was a] wonderfully thoughtful article and postdocs, Emory Law students, and Georon one of our alumni [Brendan O’Connell gia Tech MBA students who work together 90C]. During my time at Emory, there were to build a commercialization plan for the only three rather rudimentary art classes scientists’ technologies. The program is taught available to students, but fortunately, Emory by professors and lecturers at both universiwas willing to give me credit for challenging ties and covers topics such as intellectual coursework at the Atlanta College of Art. It’s AUTUMN 2013

HOW THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN

AND

IS MOVING ATLANTA FORWARD

Higher Ed 2.0 | Modern Art | New Surgery for the Young at Heart

property protection, customer outreach, and industry analysis. The program has launched several companies and has provided dozens of students invaluable experience in fields in which they would not otherwise earn exposure. Looking forward to seeing more ways in which Emory and GT can collaborate!

Eric Crane 09B Atlanta As a recent alum of the Georgia Tech–Emory joint biomedical engineering/ PhD program, I was glad to see the story on the program in the most recent issue of Emory Magazine (“Brain Gain,” autumn 2013). One detail jumped out at me in your online edition that I wanted to highlight. The “fellow researcher” in the photo with Manu Platt (page 33) is Keon-Young Park 08C 18PhD, who not only received her Ba from Emory but is currently a member of the Emory School of Medicine’s MD/PhD program in the BME department. I hope this doesn’t come off as critical, because I enjoyed the article, but this seems like a missed opportunity to highlight the collaboration between the two schools.

Ian Campbell 13PhD Powell, Wyoming Editor’s note: Failing to identify Ms. Park as an Emory alumna was indeed an oversight; thanks to Mr. Campbell for bringing this to our attention.

Has something in Emory Magazine raised your consciousness—or your hackles? Write to the editors at Emory Magazine, 1762 Clifton Road, Suite 1000, Atlanta, Georgia, 30322, or via email at paige.parvin@emory.edu. We reserve the right to edit letters for length and clarity. The views expressed by the writers do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or the administrators of Emory University.

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of Note john morgan o n S er v i n g As a tr u stee :

“When I reentered the Emory world as a volunteer after a number of years, I realized anew what a phenomenal place this is and how much good it does.”

Board of Trustees Elects New Chair Businessman and financial expert John Morgan succeeds Ben Johnson as governing board’s leader

Emory’s Board of Trustees has elected alumnus and business executive John Morgan 67OX 69B to serve as its new chair.

The resolution passed at the full board’s annual meeting, held at Emory November 8. Morgan succeeds Ben F. Johnson III 65C, who is retiring as chair after serving in the role since 2000 and as an Emory trustee since 1995. Johnson will remain active with the board as an emeritus trustee.

“John Morgan is an unusually thoughtful person. He respects and engages the views of others,

inviting and thoroughly examining the disparate views on both issues and opportunities that affect Emory,” says Emory President James Wagner. “He has spent the recent months before his tenure officially begins in scheduled conversations on campus and off in a focused effort to better understand the Emory of today and its place in the Atlanta and national communities. An accomplished businessman, John also is devoted to the humanities and their role in shaping our values and actions.”

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International efforts recognized

New diversity adviser appointed

At the annual awards ceremony of the Office of International Affairs in November, anthropology professor and global health scholar Peter Brown received the 2013 Marion V. Creekmore Award for Internationalization. Korean educator Young-Ihl Chang 87PhD received the 2013 Sheth Distinguished International Alumni Award.

Robert Franklin has been appointed senior adviser for community and diversity to the provost and other senior administrators. He previously served as Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics, director of Black Church Studies at Candler School of Theology, and senior fellow at Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, as well as president of Morehouse College.

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emor y p h oto / vi d eo

John Morgan

jac k k earse

of Note Morgan is the owner of Morgan Timber, a private timber and real estate management and development company, and also is the owner of South Coast Commercial, a real estate investment firm, both based in Bluffton, South Carolina. He serves as chair of the board of directors for the Fortune 500 Plum Creek Timber Company, one of the largest private landowners in the United States. Previously, Morgan was one of nine founders of INVESCO Capital Management, a global money management firm, where he held leadership positions from 1979 until 2000.

In 1986, he established the nonprofit Mill Creek Foundation to serve his hometown of Swainsboro, Georgia, and the surrounding area.

At Emory, Morgan has served as a trustee since 1996 and was elected a term trustee in 2000. In 1997 he joined, and later chaired, the board’s finance committee, lending his considerable financial expertise during challenging national economic times. He also has served as vice chair and chair elect. Prior to being elected a trustee, Morgan chaired Emory’s Board of Visitors; during Campaign Emory, he served as the campaign chair for Emory Libraries.

“It has been a grand growing experience to serve Emory as a trustee,” Morgan says. “When I reentered the Emory world as a volunteer after a number of years, I realized anew what a phenomenal place this is and how much good it does. I have completely committed myself to it.”

Morgan graduated from Oxford College in 1967 and received a BBA from Emory in 1969.

He went on to hold positions in general banking and public securities investment management at First Orlando Corporation (SunTrust) from 1969 to 1972, returning to Atlanta to work for Citizens & Southern Corporation (Bank of America) from 1973 to 1978 before cofounding INVESCO. As chair of the forty-one-member Board of Trustees, Morgan says he will strive to “make sure that we are communicating well and in a sensitive way among the trustees, so that we can have a uniformity of vision in terms of governance. At the heart of it, what governance has to do is test the reasonableness of what the administration puts before us, and to do that in the context of good faith, good actions, and all the attributes of good leadership.”—P.P.P.

ne w initiatives

School of Medicine and Emory Healthcare Announce Strategic Integration In an effort to increase efficiency while remaining a national model for academic health centers, School of Medicine Dean Christian Larsen 80C 84M 91MR and Emory Healthcare CEO John Fox have announced a new overarching initiative: Emory Medicine.

The School of Medicine and Emory Healthcare will work together under the Emory Medicine initiative to improve effectiveness while maximizing resources in pursuit of their shared missions of patient care, discovery, and education.

In his first annual dean’s address in November, Larsen spoke about the many challenges facing Emory and other academic medical systems.

Top among these “megatrends” driving change: an aging population with a “tidal wave” of diseases ranging from diabetes to Alzheimer’s, threatened clinical and academic revenue streams, health care waste and inefficiency, and crippling student debt (medical students average $170,000 nationally).

“We have much to be proud of this past year,” Larsen said, “including two of Emory’s hospitals ranking second and third for quality

by University HealthSystem Consortium out of more than one hundred major teaching hospitals across the country, external research funding of more than $500 million for Emory as a whole, two new Institute of Medicine members [Hubert Department of Global Health Chair Carlos Del Rio and Professor of Psychiatry Kerry Ressler], and multiple centers and programs of excellence in stroke, autism, cancer, functional glycomics, and neuromodulation, among others.”

Still, the School of Medicine is facing financial challenges, making it essential to embrace new models and new approaches, Larsen says. “There must be a move away

L e a di n g t h e way : School of Medicine Dean Christian Larsen (left) and Emory Healthcare CEO John Fox (right) have announced an overarching initiative: Emory Medicine.

from traditional norms, structures, expectations, and models of care,” he says, “to a shared vision, integrated leadership, and business discipline.”

Reliance on NIH funding, in light of the federal sequestration, must be augmented by attracting new revenue streams from foundations, philanthropy, and industry, Larsen says; fragmented, inefficient care must be replaced by coordinated, standardized, patient-centered care; internal competition must give way to shared resources, integrated planning and budgeting, and highly effective care teams. These concepts must be “not only taught in our classrooms but modeled in our clinical care delivery,” says Larsen.

“The joy of my career has been to practice across disciplines, to work with colleagues and research teams excited about trying to make a difference, to make sure that our research comes alive,” he says. “It’s not about sustaining departments or rankings, it’s about making a difference for our patients’ futures.”

Emory Medicine was approved by the Board of Trustees in June.—Mary Loftus

First Atlanta Science Festival planned for March

Grant to enhance diversity in the graduate school

The first Atlanta Science Festival, an idea born at Emory, will take place March 22 to 29, 2014. Joining Emory as founding partners are Georgia Tech and the Metro Atlanta Chamber. More than 57 partners will be putting on events at more than 30 locations during the eight-day festival, including lectures, films, performances, exhibits, trivia contests, demonstrations, workshops, guided walks, and more.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded the Laney Graduate School a $2.5 million grant over three years to increase the number of undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented groups who complete doctorates and enter the biological and biomedical sciences research workforce. The grant also will enhance the diversity of students in the school’s doctoral programs.

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of Note

f a c u lt y b o o k

Expert in Complexity C arrie Wic k h am e x ami n es t h e evolu tio n of t h e m u slim brot h er h oo d It is difficult to imagine a subject more timely, volatile, and elusive than that of Carrie Rosefsky Wickham’s The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement. Since its publication last summer, events in Egypt have continued to move with astonishing rapidity, and Wickham is increasingly sought out as a guide to the complexity of Egyptian politics. As Lisa Blaydes reports in a recent Boston Review article about Wickham’s book, she walked into the office of Essam el-Erian—deputy leader of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party— in 2007 for an interview. His first question to her was, “Do you know Carrie Wickham?”

The cover of the book depicts Muslim Brotherhood supporters celebrating the ascendancy of Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi to the presidency on June 24, 2012. Just one year

later, on July 3, 2013—the same month Wickham’s book was published—he was removed from office and charged with, according to the New York Times on September 1, “inciting his supporters and aides to commit the crimes of premeditated murder” as a result of December 2012 clashes that resulted in widespread deaths.

El-Erian remained free longer, but was himself arrested on October 30.

Wickham, associate professor of political science, hardly had time to bask in the successful launch of her second book: a scant six days after its release, she weighed in with the op-ed “Egypt’s Missed Opportunity” in the New York Times; more recently, in the Guardian, she wrote a piece warning that a ban of the Brotherhood will worsen Egypt’s divisions.

Wickham has been covering the Muslim Brotherhood since her dissertation fieldwork began in 1990. In 2002 she authored Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt. The research for her current book began in 2004 and involved 124 interviews—

including one with Morsi before his presidential run—with Islamist and secular civic and political activists, academics, and journalists in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Kuwait.

It is remarkable testimony to Wickham that an American woman could gain the trust of this group of men. Most of those interviewed spoke in Arabic to her, and all translations in the book—except where noted—are her own. The book also draws on Arabic-language primary-source documents, books, research reports, and media articles that other Western researchers have failed to mine.

The Muslim Brotherhood, despite its thrust into the political limelight with Morsi’s presidency, has seemed to thrive on the sidelines and in the shadows for much of its history.

Founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928, the Brotherhood—according to Wickham—“is the

fa c u lt y b o o k

The Muslim Brotherhood

by Carrie Rosefsk y Wic k h a m

Hardcover, 384 pp.

Princeton University Press $29.95

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Mayberg named AAAS Fellow

Candler recognized for changing the world

Helen Mayberg has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Mayberg is professor of psychiatry, neurology, and radiology and the Dorothy C. Fuqua Chair in Psychiatric Imaging and Therapeutics at the School of Medicine.

Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.

Candler School of Theology is one of 18 “Seminaries that Change the World,” (STCTW) according to Faith3, an organization that seeks to support the church as it relates to young adults. STCTW and Faith 3’s executive director, the Rev. Wayne Meisel, created the first-of-its-kind list to show service-minded young people the difference a theological education can make in their career and leadership development.

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p rotest: M A H M O UD KH A L E D /A F P/ G ett y I mages ; w ic k h am : a n n bor d e n

c o u n t r y i n c h a o s : Egypt in the wake of President Morsi’s arrest. Below, Carrie Wickham.

k ay h i n to n

of Note flagship organization of Sunni revivalist Islam and has been in existence longer than any other contemporary Islamist group in the Arab world.” It had its beginnings as a small religious and charitable society. As Wickham reveals, the group’s goal was not to seize power for itself, but to serve as a catalyst for “a broad process of social reform that would lead eventually and inevitably to the establishment of an Islamic state.”

More than eighty years after the Brotherhood’s founding, the wait continues. Wickham captures the paradoxical condition of the Brotherhood on the day of Morsi’s election, June 30, 2012: “An Islamist organization that had spent most of its existence denied legal status and subject to depredations of a hostile authoritarian state was now in charge of the very apparatus once used to repress it. And it had reached those heights not by way of coup or revolution but through the ballot box.” Despite a string of electoral victories, the Brotherhood’s power was never secure—nor was their constitution backed by a wider national consensus.

Both in the book and in more recent comments, Wickham stresses the need for what she calls a “healthy dose of humility” with regard to the Brotherhood. There is still much we don’t know about its operation. And its contradictions are many, starting with the fact that women play an active role but are denied formal rights and have little say. Reformists contend with conservatives in a perpetual seesaw for the balance of power that can result in expulsion for internal critics of the group’s senior leadership. Calling Wickham’s work “an excellent new history,” Paul Danahar of the Guardian notes that “her research in both Arabic and English has revealed several brotherhoods, oscillating between secrecy and transparency, modernity and the example of the Prophet Muhammad.”

What lies ahead for the Brotherhood?

Many will look to an American woman and Emory faculty member for thoughtful, nuanced answers.—Susan Carini 04G

discover y

wat c h t h i s : Eye-tracking technology measures infants’ responses to social cues.

The Earliest Signs S t u d y f i nds a u t i sm i s r eco g n i z a ble i n t he f i r s t mon t hs of l i fe

Researchers at Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory’s School of Medicine have identified signs of autism present in the first months of life.

The researchers followed babies from birth until age three, using eye-tracking technology to measure the way infants look at and respond to social cues. Infants later diagnosed with autism showed declining attention to the eyes of other people, from the age of two months onward. The results were reported in the advanced online publication of the journal Nature.

The study followed two groups of infants, one at low and one at high risk for having autism spectrum disorders. High-risk infants

had an older sibling already diagnosed with autism, increasing the infant’s risk of also having the condition twentyfold. In contrast, low-risk infants had no first-, second-, or third-degree relatives with autism.

“By following these babies from birth, and intensively within the first six months, we were able to collect large amounts of data long before overt symptoms are typically seen,” says Warren Jones, director of research at Marcus Autism Center, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics, and the lead author on the study. Teams of clinicians assessed the children longitudinally and confirmed their diagnostic outcomes at age three.

Then the researchers analyzed data from the infants’ first months to identify what factors separated those who received an autism diagnosis from those who did not.

What they learned was surprising. “We found a steady decline in attention to other people’s eyes, from two until twenty-four months, in infants later diagnosed with autism,” says coinvestigator Ami Klin, director of Marcus Autism Center and chief of the Division of Autism and Related Disorders in the Department of Pediatrics.

Differences were apparent even within the first six months, which has profound implications. “First, these results reveal that there are measurable and identifiable differences present already before six months. And second, we observed declining eye fixation over time, rather than an outright absence. Both these factors have the potential to dramatically shift the possibilities for future strategies of early intervention.”

Although the results indicate that attention to others’ eyes is already declining by two to six months in infants later diagnosed with autism, attention to others’ eyes does not appear to be entirely absent. If infants were identified at this early age, interventions could more successfully build on the levels of eye contact that are present.

More information can be found at www.marcus.org/infants.—Holly Korschun

Hill elected to Academia Europaea

Goizueta ranks highly for job placement

Craig L. Hill, Goodrich C. White Professor of Chemistry, has been elected to the Academia Europaea (EA), the Academy of Europe. The EA is a European nongovernmental association of scholars who are recognized as global leaders in their field. The 3,000 scholars in its ranks, from 35 European countries and eight non-European countries, include 38 Nobel Prize winners.

As reported by Poets & Quants, a web news source on business schools, for the second consecutive year, Emory’s Goizueta Business School boasted the best MBA placement record of any US business school in the Top 30, with 98.1 percent of the Class of 2013 reporting job offers three months after graduation. Goizueta’s Career Management Center partners with students early in their MBA experience.

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st u d e n t l i f e

You Going to Eat That?

S t u d e n ts part n er w it h p eers to e n co u rage h ealt h y c h oices

Cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Human Health and Emory Dining, the program illustrates a growing emphasis on the part of Emory College to apply academics in the real world to make positive changes.

“It’s gone fabulously well as a pilot,” says Jill Welkley, associate professor of psychology, who has worked closely with Tricia Simonds, registered dietitian and senior lecturer, and Michelle Lampl, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology, to develop the program as an extension of the Peer Health Partner program, where upperclassmen receive intensive academic training before leading first-year students in Health 100 classes.

“A focus on health in the undergraduate curriculum reflects Emory’s preeminence in the science of health,” says Lampl, director of the Center for the Study of Human Health.

“And health is more than the absence of disease—it’s more about well-being and healthy behaviors.” She is enthusiastic about students having conversations that focus on food and exercise, especially during a time when they are building behavior patterns for the rest of their lives.

v e g o u t: Senior Kylie McKenzie (left) and recent grad Brooke Woodward are part of a pilot program created to help first-year students avoid the notorious “freshman fifteen” by eating well.

“Wherever our students’ careers take them, we believe that the human health program provides an understanding from which they can make informed decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities in the future,” she says.

And Emory ­Dining couldn’t be more pleased.

“The Healthy Eating Partners Program brings to life an important component of our Emory Dining vision—to provide the campus community with important information about how menu choices affect personal health,” notes Dave Furhman, senior director of University Food Service Administration. “The Healthy Eating Partners Program does an exceptional job by providing peer-to-peer partnering in making choices.”

When McKenzie looks back at her four years at Emory, she’s amazed at how much human health students have done to create a more positive culture at Emory. “It’s been awesome to contribute to that,” she says.—Hal Jacobs

TICKER

10

Grant to foster environmental scholarship

Liotta named to National Academy of Inventors

The Ray C. Anderson Foundation has awarded $400,000 to the Center for Ethics to launch a four-year program aimed at developing scholars and teachers in sustainability worldwide. The grant will fund an initiative at the ethics center called the Culture, Religion, Ethics, and the Environment (CREATE) program, which will study the religious, ethical, and cultural foundations for the environmental movement.

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has named Emory’s Dennis Liotta, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Chemistry and executive director of the Emory Institute for Drug Development, to the 2013 class of NAI Fellows. Liotta joins 143 innovators to receive NAI Fellow status, representing 94 prestigious research universities, governmental, and nonprofit research institutions.

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k ay h i n to n

As All-American swimmers on Emory’s national championship swimming and ­diving team, Kylie McKenzie 14C and Brooke ­Woodward 13C know the importance of fueling their bodies with the right food. But when they first came to Emory four years ago, they never imagined they would become advocates for healthy eating on campus.

After three years of academic course work in human health, however, McKenzie (a biology major) and Woodward (an anthropology major) are coleaders in a pilot Healthy Eating Partners program that reaches out to firstyear students during peak dining hours in the Dobbs University Center (DUC) dining hall.

Thanks to an upper-level nutrition course, six upperclassmen partners can point out where one should look for the majority of their calories, talk about the value of organic food over the processed stuff, delve into the science of nutrition, and gather feedback from students for sharing with the Campus Dining staff. They can discuss the pros and cons of garbanzo beans and grilled chicken over pizza and French fries, fresh fruit over Trix cereal.

“It’s definitely a passion I’ve discovered at Emory,” says Woodward, who foresees nutrition playing a big role in her future.

Her roommate McKenzie agrees that the extra hours—on top of swim team and other extracurriculars—have been worth it. “It’s really been fun to work together with students and dining services staff in this area. It definitely makes you appreciate what it takes to run something like this, to provide meals for so many people.”

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scie n ce o f a f e at h e r : Martin’s drawing of a skid mark left by a bird landing on soft sand. A rear toe is one feature linking modern birds to dinosaurs.

Making Tracks

ill u stratio n b y a n t h o n y marti n

a n t hon y m a r t i n follows i n t he foo t s t eps of p r eh i s to r i c b i r ds

Two fossilized footprints found at Dinosaur Cove in Victoria, Australia, were likely made by birds during the Early Cretaceous period, making them the oldest known bird tracks in Australia.

The journal Palaeontology is publishing an analysis of the footprints led by environmental studies professor Anthony Martin, who specializes in trace fossils including tracks, burrows, and nests. The study was coauthored

by Patricia Vickers-Rich and Michael Hall of Monash University in Victoria and Thomas Rich of the Museum Victoria in Melbourne.

Much of the rocky coastal strata of Dinosaur Cove in southern Victoria were formed in river valleys in a polar climate during the Early Cretaceous period. A great rift valley formed as the ancient supercontinent Gondwana broke up and Australia separated from Antarctica.

“These tracks are evidence that we had sizeable, flying birds living alongside other kinds of dinosaurs on these polar, river floodplains, about 105 million years ago,” Martin says.

The thin-toed tracks in fluvial sandstone were likely made by two individual birds that were about the size of a great egret or a small heron, Martin says. Rear-pointing toes helped distinguish the tracks as avian, as opposed to a third fossil track that was discovered at the same

time, made by a non-avian theropod. A long drag mark on one of the two bird tracks particularly interested Martin.

“I immediately knew what it was—a flight landing track— because I’ve seen many similar tracks made by egrets and herons on the sandy beaches of Georgia,” Martin says.

Martin often leads student field trips to Georgia’s coast and barrier islands, where he studies modern-day tracks and other life traces, to help him better identify fossil traces.

The ancient landing track from Australia “has a beautiful skid mark from the back toe dragging in the sand, likely caused as the bird was flapping its wings and coming in for a soft landing,” Martin says. Fossils of landing tracks are rare, he adds, and could add to our understanding of the evolution of flight. Today’s birds are actually modern-day dinosaurs, and share many characteristics with non-avian dinosaurs that went extinct, such as nesting and burrowing. The theropod carnivore Tyrannosaurus rex had a vestigial rear toe, evidence that T. rex shared a common ancestor with birds.

Dinosaur Cove has yielded a rich trove of non-avian dinosaur bones from dozens of species, but only one skeletal piece of a bird—a fossilized wishbone—has been found in the Cretaceous rocks of Victoria. Martin spotted the first known dinosaur trackway of Victoria in 2010, and a few other tracks have been discovered since then. Volunteers working in Dinosaur Cove found these latest tracks on a slab of rock, and Martin later analyzed them.

The tracks were made on the moist sand of a river bank, perhaps following a polar winter.

“The picture of early bird evolution in the Southern Hemisphere is mostly incomplete,” Martin says, “but with these tracks, it just got a little better.”—Carol Clark

New Center Focuses on Behavioral Health Researchers from the Department of Health Policy and Management at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health opened a new Center for Behavioral Health Policy Studies in October. The center’s mission is to improve the lives of people with mental and substance use disorders through research, education, and service.

The Center for Behavioral Health Policy Studies, led by Rollins Professor Benjamin Druss, is made up of a multidisciplinary team of faculty, staff, and students from Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of South Carolina, and The Carter Center Mental Health Program. Examples of ongoing projects include intervention studies to develop and test new models integrating mental health and primary care, studies examining access and quality of care for disadvantaged children with mental health and substance abuse disorders, and evaluations of state and federally funded mental health policies and programs.

“This center is the result of over ten years of a growing portfolio of research and collaborations both within and outside of Emory,” says Druss. “The establishment of the center will help Emory be recognized as a national leader in mental health and substance use services research, teaching, and evaluation.”

Seven Emory nurses honored

Parkinson’s researcher receives Breakthrough Prize

Seven Emory nurses received top honors in selected categories at the 2013 Nurse of the Year Awards, sponsored by the Georgia Chapter of the March of Dimes in partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia. More than 800 nurses were nominated from across the state.

The awards recognize nurses who demonstrate exceptional patient care, compassion, and service.

Mahlon R. DeLong, professor of neurology in the School of Medicine, is one of six recipients of the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

The $3 million award recognizes excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life. DeLong was recognized for defining and characterizing the circuits in the brain that malfunction in Parkinson’s disease.

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o f f ice h o u rs

Gregory Berns on

What Your Dog Is Thinking Nearly half of American households are home to at least one dog—evidence that a good many of us understand instinctively the rewards of canine companionship. Studies have found that dog owners are happier and more physically fit than those without dogs.

But much about the scientific reasons for the human-canine bond, and specifically how a dog’s brain functions, has long been a mystery. Last year, Gregory Berns, Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy, led a landmark effort to change that by capturing the first-ever brain images of alert, unrestrained dogs who had been trained to comfortably enter an fMRI machine.

In what came to be called the Dog Project, the harmless fMRI scans shed new light on how dogs respond to people by recording which regions of the brain were activated in reaction to various stimuli. In his book about the Dog Project, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain, Berns considers the implications of the study and what it might mean for dog lovers and the four-legged friends who, it now appears, really do love them back.—P.P.P.

Rex is watching you. The Dog Project indicates that pet dogs are exquisitely attuned to their owners—not just our actions, but also our state of mind. They use all their senses (particularly their noses, which are one hundred thousand times more powerful than ours) to continually monitor, interpret, and anticipate everything we do. “The most important thing we learned was that dogs’ brains show evidence of a theory of mind for humans,” Berns writes.

“This means that they not only pay attention to what we do but to what we think, and they change their behavior based on what they think we’re thinking.”

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Fido craves clear ­communication.

If your dog seems aloof or bored in your company, it’s probably because she can’t understand a word you’re saying. “Humans are sloppy creatures,” Berns says.

“Like the proverbial bull in a china shop, we are oblivious to our body language. We bump into objects.

We accidentally step on our dogs’ tails. We emit a constant stream of sounds with frequently inconsistent meanings. It is a wonder that dogs can pull anything consistent out of this barrage of signals. And yet they do.”

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Spot can empathize. The Emory researchers found that dogs have an astonishing degree of interspecies social intelligence, easily interacting and forming bonds with other species—cats, farm animals, and yes, people. Nonhuman primates, who also have been shown to have high social cognition, don’t socialize with other species nearly as readily. “Dogs’ great social intelligence means that they probably also have a high capacity for empathy,” Berns says. “More than intuiting what we think, dogs may also feel what we feel. Just like people, if dogs can be happy, then surely they can be sad and lonely.”

Muffy may find the “pack leader” routine overrated.

According to Berns’s findings, dogs are so sensitive to human signals that they don’t need a heavy hand—literally or figuratively—to tell them what to do.

“While it is easy to confuse being a pack leader with being dominant, that is a mistake that has harmed more dogs than any other piece of advice,” Berns writes.

“The better analogy for being a pack leader comes from management literature. While there are different styles of leadership, the most important characteristics of a great leader are clarity and consistency.”

ill u stratio n b y la u ra co y le

Four Things to Know about How Your Dog Thinks

of Note In class: hist383

k ay h i n to n

Co u rse d escri p ti o n : This popular undergraduate class surveys the history, politics, and diplomacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The first portion of the course covers historical origins and development up to the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948, while the second part focuses on more recent political, social, and economic aspects of the conflict, including the engagement of outside powers and efforts to resolve tension through negotiations. The goal, Professor Kenneth W. Stein explains, is for students to understand the complexity of the conflict dynamically using original sources and texts.

Fa c u lt y C V : Kenneth W. Stein, the William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History, Political Science, and Israeli Studies since 1977, is among Emory’s foremost experts on the Middle East. He received his undergraduate degree from Franklin and Marshall College and dual master’s and a doctoral degree from the University of Michigan,

studying medieval Islamic and modern Middle Eastern history, Middle Eastern politics, and modern Jewish history. Stein has written extensively on these subjects and has been recognized with Emory’s highest awards for teaching and scholarship. In 2011, Emory College created the Kenneth W. Stein Fund for the study of modern Israel and also an endowed professorship in his name. t o d ay ’ s l ect u re : Stein encourages

students to learn the narratives of Palestinian and Israeli lives to understand self perspective, identity, and claims of legitimacy. Together, Stein and the students work energetically and interactively to complete a chart deciphering the elements involved in writing history according to a particular point of view.

symbols at work. For instance, for many ­Palestinians—whether they had property or did not, whether they lived in urban areas or in the countryside—“a key became a symbol of going back. The key became a powerful icon in Palestinian identity.”

S t u d e n ts s ay: “As a Jewish student in Professor Stein’s class, I naturally began the semester with my own perspective on the conflict based on my cultural heritage. However, Professor Stein presents such an unbiased description of the conflict and its origins that my perspective has completely changed, and I see both sides more clearly.”—Michael Fires 15C

—Madison Lampert 15C

Q u o tes t o n o te : Discussing interpreta-

tions of Israeli and Palestinian land ownership, Stein encourages students to consider the significance of the myriad stories and winter 2014

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S ecret Li v es

D ay J o b : Senior research s­ cientist in neuroengineering with joint appointments at Emory and Georgia Tech; holds degrees from the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering S ecret Li f e :

Paralympic athlete

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When she was eighteen, Cassie Mitchell 04G 09PhD woke up one morning and couldn’t walk.

She has not moved her legs since. Diagnosed with neuromyelitis optica, or Devic’s disease—an autoimmune disorder that attacks the spine—Mitchell had to change her plans to attend college on a track scholarship and then go on to medical school to become a surgeon. As a student at Oklahoma State University, Mitchell was approached by a coach who noticed her strength and skill in her wheelchair. She joined the parasports team and went on to become a world champion in paracycling and para track and field, holding records in both. Mitchell placed fourth in track and field at the 2012 Paralympics in London, and hopes to return to the competition in Rio in 2016. She also serves as a mentor to recent spinal cord injury patients at Shepherd Center.

H E R W o r d s : “When I joined the parasports

team in college, it was like I was given back a part of me that had been taken away. It just grew from there. Now I find that some of my best ideas come to me during a hard workout when I’m thinking about my research. The most important thing about [doing parasports] isn’t the thing anyone would expect—it’s that it keeps me fit and healthy and independent, able to do things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. I love the thrill and adrenaline rush of competing, but what’s most important is what you get out of it every day.”

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Cassie Mitchell 04G 09PhD

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Soar On, Eagles

k ay h i n to n

The distinguished career of Emory’s athletics mascot The score stands Eagles 26, Bears 23 . . . Tigers 20, Hawks 14, Wildcats 10. Oh, and Panthers and Wolves tied at 11.

That’s an informal tally of the most common mascots for US colleges and universities, according to one website that comes up on a Google search.

Let us focus for a moment on those eagles, apparently the alpha species of the mascot kingdom. Symbolizing athletic prowess, school pride, and transcendence over graphic-design challenges, mascot eagles take wing with often earthbound names. They are called Archibald, Awesome, Azul, Baldwin, Beaker, Big Stuff, and Clawed Z. At E we find a veritable aerie—Eddie, Eli, Ellsworth, Eppy, and Ernie (I and II, for Bridgewater College and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University).

Moving on, we have Freedom, Golden, Gus, MoHarv, Monty, Sammy D., Scrappy, Screech A., Sparky. The most clever eagle name belongs to Seymour D’Campus (Southern Mississippi). Skipping over the name Swoop for the moment, we round out the list with Tuffy and War Eagle VII. It is quite a double baker’s dozen of mascots.

But back to Swoop. He is, of course, the Emory eagle, or more appropriately, the Emory capital-E Eagle. You may have seen a photo of a bird purporting to be him on the back of the last issue of this magazine. That bird was a fly-by-night imposter. We are not sure how he slipped his image past certain sharp eyes, but we believe he may have ended up at Athletic Director Tim Downes’s home for Thanksgiving dinner.

Emory’s real Swoop shares a moniker with the redtailed hawk of the University of Utah, the eagle of Eastern Washington, the bald eagle of Eastern Michigan, and the “RedHawk” (whatever that is—no such creature graces the leaves in Audubon’s collection) of Miami University.

Let’s face it. We seem to have, in this flight of eagles and this whoosh of Swoops, either a lack of imagination or a genre that has grown stale and predictable. So many eagles.

So many Swoops. Where is the creativity, the distinction, the institutional character captured in a single cartoonlike being?

Yes, some universities do strive to display their collective chutzpah by choosing outlandish mascots. But, really, what sense is there in cheering on the Fighting Okra (Delta State) or Sammy the Banana Slug (U.C. Santa Cruz)? And what fan of any sport other than hockey is going to root for Puckman, the walking hockey puck with a hard hat who represents Rensselaer Polytechnic? As for WuShock, Wichita State’s walking shock of wheat—please.

Within Emory’s own athletic conference, the University Athletic Association, Emory athletes regularly compete against Bears (Wash U.), Yellowjackets (Rochester), Spartans (Case Western Reserve), and Bobcats (NYU). Those are some threatening opponents. Let us not forget, however, that NYU

also calls its teams the Violets, while Brandeis presumably puts up some sort of balanced contest as the Judges.

And I am sorry, but there is something just not right about competing against the Maroons of Chicago or the Carnegie Mellon Tartans. How can any self-respecting team try to defeat a color or a plaid skirt?

Which brings me back to the Emory Eagle. This mascot dates back to 1960, when Emory Wheel sports editor David Kross 62C felt the absence of a decent representative for the university’s intramural athletes and the few intercollegiate teams that Emory then fielded (track, tennis, swimming and diving, soccer, cross-country). The mocking, or possibly merely self-deprecating, names of earlier Emory teams—the Hillbillies and the Tea-sippers—simply would not do. After proposing the alliterative Eagles and hearing no objection, Kross announced the fait accompli. For more than half a century the name has stuck.

But wait. Were there not other “E” possibilities that Kross might have turned to? My undergraduate alma mater (Lehigh) at one time fielded the Engineers, but Emory’s only engineer is our president, and even Lehigh recognized the preposterousness of that mascot and changed it more than a decade ago to a Mountain Hawk named Clutch. Several schools give battle as the Elephants, and Tufts even names its teams for one particular elephant—Jumbo.

My desultory research, however, turns up not a single mascot who is an egret, earwig, emu, emperor penguin, English shepherd, or Epagneul Pont-Audemer. There was room in this list for stamping Emory’s athletes with a difference. Mr. Kross chose more wisely.

In the end, I am left to conclude that our Eagles are all right. While there are others, Emory Eagles distinguish themselves by their combination of athletic skill and intellectual acumen. And while there are other Swoops, this Swoop, who in an earlier incarnation resembled Tweety Bird, has matured into a raptor of imposing, if not fearsome, dimensions. I can’t put my finger on it, but thanks to Swoop and the Eagles, I’ve got a peaceful, easy feeling.—Gary Hauk 91PhD

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t h e b i g E : Emory’s Swoop on parade.

b etter than nothing:

David Kross chose the Eagles to represent Emory while sports editor for the Wheel in 1960. Kross played right wing and was captain on the university’s first soccer team, and he said that other schools “just calling us the ‘Emory nothings’ was not enough.”

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rese a rc h

Catalyst for Change E ri S ai k awa is bri d gi n g d isci p li n es a n d bri n gi n g toget h er e x p erts to st u dy t h e e n viro n me n t Most of the facu lt y in Emory ’s ­Department of Environmental Sciences look forward to getting into the field, whether it’s to track wild primates through an African rainforest, chase after bumblebees in a Rocky Mountain meadow or just splash through metro-Atlanta streams to monitor mosquitoes and their larvae.

Eri Saikawa, however, loves nothing better than being indoors, battling computerprogramming bugs as she wades into murky problems involving mathematics, atmospheric chemistry, and global environmental policy.

“I was never an outdoor person,” says Saikawa, assistant professor of environmental sciences. She smiles at the irony as she sits before her computer, wrapped in a comfy throw to ward off the fall chill seeping through the windows of her fifth-floor office. Using a numerical model, she is able to analyze the link between current emissions, air quality, and the climate to understand the impact of economic activities on the environment in different parts of the world.

Saikawa is an eclectic mix of interests, experience, and knowledge. Her research into public 16

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policy and the science of emissions linked to air pollution, ozone depletion, and global warming forms a patchwork quilt of expertise that covers many of the major environmental issues facing the world today.

Since she arrived at Emory last year, Saikawa and her colleagues have identified more than two dozen faculty and staff, from anthropology to sociology, from business to public health, whose work involves climate change.

“We’re hoping to knit this network of faculty together into a team at Emory,” Saikawa says. She would eventually like to see this network expand to include researchers at Georgia Tech and other nearby institutions.

“It’s really not possible to understand climate change from the standpoint of one discipline,” she says. “Our energy system is changing. Our air is changing. Our supplies of water and energy are changing. The way we use land is changing. Ecosystems are changing. It’s not just climate change. It’s really global environmental change, and change in one system affects another, and so on. We need to find ways to show how it is all connected.”

As a child growing up in Japan, Saikawa

was drawn to reading and challenging puzzles.

“I would go to a bookstore whenever I had the time,” she recalls of her elementary- and middle-school days in Tokyo. “I had a white board, and my father would give me interesting number-related problems to solve on it.”

She attended an all-girls school and remembers spending a lot of time in the library reading. One book that made a big impression on her was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the 1962 exposé on pesticides and pollution that helped launch the American environmental movement.

“I was fascinated with chemistry and technology, and I decided that I wanted to apply it to solve global environmental problems,” she says.

Japan was testing linear motor trains that use magnetic force instead of wheels and fossil fuels for propulsion. Saikawa developed her own summer project, studying how the trains worked and analyzing their potential impact.

When she was thirteen, her father’s job took the family to London, where Saikawa spent her high school years. She returned to Japan and majored in chemistry and biotechnology at the University of Tokyo. “I was very naïve, and I thought that technology was going to solve all of the world’s problems,” Saikawa recalls. “But I realized that technology is mainly focused on making new products, not necessarily for social importance.”

She decided to combine her science background with knowledge of the policymaking process. She did an internship at the World Bank, earned a master’s degree at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and entered the PhD program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

“I took a lot of political science classes, and it was mind-blowing,” she says. “There is a focus on security and war in international relations with little emphasis on the environment. While political science is all about generalizing, you really can’t generalize about environmental problems because they are all so different. It helped me understand why it’s so difficult to establish protocols.”

After twenty-five years of international efforts to address global warming, an endless series of high-level meetings has not changed the rapid growth in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. The levels have ballooned from preindustrial levels of 280 parts per million (ppm) to 317 ppm in 1960 and 400 ppm at various points in 2013.

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d a r k h o r i z o n : Environmental sciences professor Eri Saikawa hopes new knowledge will brighten the outlook for the planet’s future.

of Note As growth in carbon dioxide emissions from the US began to slow, China’s exploded, going from 4.28 billion tons in 2000 to more than 10 billion tons in 2010. Scientific groups from seventeen different countries compile data for the United Nations Emissions Gap Report, which in 2013 warned that if these countries don’t fulfill their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the goal of limiting the global temperature rise will not be possible.

Carbon dioxide is just one greenhouse gas linked to a changing climate and human health problems. Nitrous oxide, for instance, is the leading cause of the depletion of the protective layer of ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere, and the third-largest greenhouse gas, after carbon dioxide and methane. Human activity, especially agriculture, has boosted the emission levels in recent decades. Livestock manure and fertilizers containing nitrates, ammonia, or urea generate nitrous oxide as they decompose.

“Nitrous oxide emissions stay in the atmosphere for 125 years, similar to carbon dioxide.

So it’s very important that we take action now,” says Saikawa, who began developing models for nitrous oxide emissions in her previous

position with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Global Change Science.

Until fairly recently, the US was the main nitrogen consumer from fertilizers. China now holds the top spot, as its consumption went up 40 percent during the past ten years and US consumption declined. We should not, however, single out China when it comes to climate change, Saikawa says; there is plenty of responsibility to go around the globe.

Shortly after Typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful tropical cyclone ever to make landfall, slammed into the Philippines, the 2013 meeting of the United Nations Framework for Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) convened in Warsaw. While no single storm can be attributed to climate change, most experts agree that extreme weather events will become more common as the average temperature of the Earth warms. Rising sea levels also will make many human populations more vulnerable to the impact of storm surges.

News of the devastation caused by Haiyan hung like a dark cloud over the Warsaw meeting, which concluded with a call for a universal climate agreement in 2015. Details are

scheduled to be hammered out at next year’s conference in Peru, before a final agreement is tackled in Paris in 2015.

Emory is applying for accreditation as an official UNFCCC observer, so that students and faculty can attend the annual gatherings to present research and experience the process firsthand. Saikawa says that the university is well positioned to make contributions in the climate change arena, due to its strong interdisciplinary nature. Her classes on air pollution and research methods have drawn students not just from environmental sciences, but from a range of majors across the sciences and humanities.

“I push students who are planning to go into policymaking to understand the physical science, and I push the science majors to understand policy analysis,” she says. “You need a good grounding in both to make a difference.”

More people are beginning to realize that climate change is not just an environmental problem. “It’s all connected and there is no simple solution,” Saikawa says. “That is why there is a need for research.”—Carol Clark

ADDING IT ALL UP: 2013 RESEARCH FUNDING Researchers at Emory University received

$ 507.1M

Distribution:

Yerkes Primate Research Center

$64.8M

School of Medicine

Federal Funding

Emory College

$330.5M

$173.3M

$333.8M

$9.3M

$7.2M

$27.7M

Non-federal Funding

$3.7M

Rollins School of Public Health

$63.9M

$287M

NIH Funding

School of Nursing

Other

Laney Graduate School

10-Year Funding History:

MILLIONS

600

All funding NIH funding

400 200 0 2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

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The Peace Maker Dean Susan Henry-Crowe leaves a legacy of religious pluralism and reconciliation

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Susan HenryCrowe

Emory, says the rich collegial relationship between the counseling center and Religious Life has provided “a very firm safety net for our students.”

Henry-Crowe sees her place as “affirming both particularity and universality on a richly diverse campus. Part of the way I do this is by being a companion and walking with people where they are. Another way is by creating spaces, both literal and metaphorical, that are undefined, open, safe, inclusive, and roomy enough to include everyone,” she says.

One of the most flexible of these sacred spaces, Henry-Crowe says, is Cannon Chapel, a place originally designed and since renovated to be multireligious.

Henry-Crowe began an Inter-Religious Council (IRC) to help students understand religious practices and beliefs other than their own through education, service, and socializing. She sought out religious leaders from other faiths to serve with her as staff, scholars, and interns in the Office of Religious Life.

Reverend Lisa Garvin, who has been named acting dean of the chapel and religious life, says pastoral care is part of Henry-Crowe’s identity.

“She sees deep into the soul—of the individual and of the institution. With a gleam in her eye, she offers profound peace in the midst of conflict or chaos,” Garvin says. “I’ve learned from her that everyone has a place at the table, and that the table is large and round, yet intimate.”

Henry-Crowe made sure that Emory not only acknowledged the religious life of students outside a Western context, but championed it, says former Hindu religious life adviser Harshita Mruthinti Kamath 12PhD, now assistant professor of religion at Middlebury College.

“Through her pioneering vision,” she said, “Emory began to incorporate [multiple] religious prayers into its university-wide ceremonies, such as freshman convocation, baccalaureate, Commencement, and even presidential inaugurations.”

Founder of the Muslim Student Association, religious life adviser Isam Vaid 93OX 95C 98PH says he found a kindred spirit in HenryCrowe from the beginning. “Her emphasis has consistently been that mutual respect should be the prevailing standard—we can’t settle for tolerance,” he says.

An ordained United Methodist elder and the first female president of the United Methodist Church’s Judicial Council, Henry-Crowe will become general secretary of the General Board of Church and Society— the United Methodist Church’s main arm for social justice and advocacy, education, and international outreach, based in Washington, D.C. At Emory, Henry-Crowe was named one of the university’s 175 Makers of History, and has served as adjunct faculty at Candler School of Theology, where in 1995 she received the school’s Distinguished Alumni Award.

“Susan Henry-Crowe has left an indelible stamp on religious life at Emory. Indeed, she has built a national model for how to care for the spiritual needs and longings of the students, faculty, and staff on a university campus,” says President James Wagner. “Perhaps her most lasting contribution will be the ways she has helped reinforce Emory’s vibrant Methodist heritage while leading an interfaith ministry that nurtures both authentic expression of one’s own faith and respect for the many religious traditions in our diverse community.”—Mary Loftus

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With her bright copper hair, warm smile, soothing voice, and wise words, the Reverend Susan Henry-Crowe 76T has been a fixture at Commencement, worship gatherings, and prayer services for more than two decades as Emory’s dean of the chapel and religious life.

But beneath her calm demeanor is a fierce advocate for social justice. “I was honored and surprised when [President] Jim Laney invited me to take the position,” says Henry-Crowe.

“He knew me from my days as an Emory student and an activist.”

One of the first female university chaplains in the South, Henry-Crowe has championed interreligious dialogue, pluralism, and worship space at Emory for all—Muslims and Christians, Hindus and Jews, the devoutly religious and the spiritually searching.

She led trips of students, alumni, faculty, and staff, through the university’s Journeys program, to Israel, the Palestinian territories, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Cuba, and other places of oppression or conflict, supporting the work of peace and reconciliation. “Journeys is about listening to people’s stories in the midst of suffering and joy,” she says.

She has comforted medical students as they cut into their first cadavers, parents as they learned about the death of their child at college, students struggling with their own religious convictions and traditions, and the entire Emory community during times of national crises, fear, and uncertainty.

Bobbi Patterson 94PhD, who was associate university chaplain when Henry-Crowe was hired as chaplain in 1991, says, “I’ve watched Susan draw a group of people struggling to move through a contested question toward understanding, as if her very presence were a light.”

And Mark McLeod 82PhD, director of Counseling and Psychological Services at

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to p a n d ce n ter rig h t: k ay h i n to n ; bottom a n d lo w er rig h t: br ya n melt z

The Visit, 2013

A n u n c o m m o n p r o f e s s o r : His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama came to Emory for a threeday visit in October, making the most of every moment with an ambitious schedule of lectures and seminars, cultural celebrations, and academic exchanges. Wherever he went—from auditoriums to sanctuaries to quiet backstage spaces—he created a classroom. The week marked the third trip to Emory for the Tibetan spiritual leader as a Presidential Distinguished Professor. Despite his international stature, the self-described “hopeless professor” proved an accessible teacher, creating

frequent moments of connection and exchange with students, faculty, and staff across the campus.

In his opening lecture, the Dalai Lama challenged the next generation to turn the twenty-first century into “a peaceful century” through dialogue, respect, mindfulness, and fostering “a oneness with humanity.” “We must make every effort to build this century as a century of compassion,” he urged. “It can be done. I think actually action is more important than faith, than prayers. In order to carry off effective action, meaningful action, we need vision, we need enthusiasm.”

Who’s the Fairest? n a r c i ss i sm r eflec t s p r es i den t s ’ b r i g h t a nd d a r k s i des

Narcissus, the character of Greek mythology who wound up falling in love with his own reflection, hardly seems like a good role model.

For those dreaming of becoming president of the United States, however, some narcissistic traits may be worth fostering, suggests an analysis by Emory psychologists.

They found that grandiose narcissism in US presidents is associated with ratings by historians of overall greatness of presidencies, as well as high marks for public persuasiveness, crisis management, risk-taking, winning the popular vote, and initiating legislation. On the flip side, the study showed that grandiose narcissism is also associated with some negative outcomes, such as presidential impeachment resolutions, cheating, and bending rules.

The journal Psychological Science is publishing the results of the analysis, led

by Ashley Watts, a graduate student in psychology at Emory, and Scott Lilienfeld, professor of psychology.

“Most people think of narcissism as predominantly maladaptive,” Watts says, “but our data support the theory that there are bright and dark sides to grandiose narcissism.”

Lyndon B. Johnson scored highest on markers of grandiose narcissism, followed

by Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.

The analyses drew upon personality assessments of forty-two presidents, up to and including George W. Bush, compiled by coauthors Steven Rubenzer and Thomas Faschingbauer for their book ­Personality, Character and Leadership in the White House. For rankings on various aspects of job performance, the analysis relied primarily on data from two large surveys of presidential historians: One conducted by C-SPAN in 2009 and a second conducted by Siena College in 2010.

“In US history, there is an enormous variety in presidential leadership style and success,” Lilienfeld says. “One of the greatest mysteries in politics is what qualities make a great leader and which ones make a disastrous, failed leader. Grandiose narcissism may be one important part of the puzzle.”—Carol Clark winter 2014

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St e a dY H a nd,

W ise H e a rt ────── After thirteen years as chair of Emory’s Board of Trustees, Ben F. Johnson III steps down, reflecting upon a life of service at a university deeply entwined with his own family history. ──────

BY K imber W il li a ms Pho to BY Pa r is h Koh a n i m

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Ben F. Johnson III 65C glances out an ornately arched window, quietly studying the tangled woodland ravine

that rambles behind the Michael C. Carlos Hall near the southern end of Emory’s main campus. • Rooted amid a cluster of formal academic architecture, the urban woodland is unexpected—a deeply shaded pocket of native beech, white oak, hickory, and tulip poplar preserved as a vestige of what the campus used to be. • Standing on a winding staircase within Carlos Hall, the original home to Emory’s School of Law, Johnson is immersed in history—the story of Emory, yes, but his own family history as well. Histories so deeply entwined, in fact, that it’s hard to know where each begins and ends.

Case in point: It was Johnson’s father, former School of Law Dean Ben F. Johnson Jr. 36C 40L, who decided in 1966 that plans for a new law school must not encroach upon that neighboring ravine—today, a natural area on campus relatively untouched by the march of time.

A nostalgic sense of his own beginnings has brought Johnson back to this building—the very place he used to frequent as a young boy, when he would routinely accompany his father here on Saturdays. As the elder Johnson caught up on the work of reading, preparing class presentations, and grading exams, his son would linger nearby, reading and working puzzles, watching, and learning. And preparing, always preparing—a work ethic that has followed Ben Johnson III throughout his life.

So it is that Johnson has readied himself for this day, choosing to stand here, in Emory’s former law school—a building he virtually grew up in—for a formal portrait that will commemorate a major milestone, both for himself and the university that he cares about so deeply.

For the past thirteen years, Johnson has served as chair of Emory’s Board of Trustees, shepherding a body charged with the powerful task of overseeing governance of the university, helping to shape its leadership team, and ensuring its long-range fiduciary health.

On November 8, at the Emory Board of Trustees’ annual meeting, Johnson formally relinquished that role, as the board passed a resolution to elect Emory alumnus and business executive John Morgan 67OX 69B (see story, page 6) as its new chair. Board bylaws dictate that the board chair must step down at the age of seventy—a rule Johnson wholeheartedly endorses.

“It allows the next generation to have its own shot at molding the institution, facilitating its growth,” Johnson explains, noting that he’ll continue to serve the board as a trustee emeritus.

As for his own legacy in helping shape Emory’s story, Johnson believes that’s for others to decide. But there is no doubt about what has compelled him to serve a university whose history has become so entangled with his own.

In a word, gratitude.

T h e u n r u ly par a d ox If there is any constant in the life of a university, it is the unrelenting swell and heave of change—a dynamic that Johnson eloquently described in a November 2000 speech to honor outgoing Board of Trustees Chair Brad Currey: 22

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“A great university is a thing of unruly paradox,” Johnson said. “It is a place of tranquil reflection and a testing place and indeed a battleground of outrageous ideas.

“It requires stability, yet is a catalyst for change. It teaches respect for boundaries, yet encourages pushing those boundaries. It is a place of self-conscious egalitarianism, yet a place of studied rank. It trains for the sacred, as well as the secular. It gleans from the past to prepare for the future.”

A great university, he noted, “needs leadership that understands the unruliness of the paradox, leadership that celebrates the unruliness of the paradox—and is committed to protecting the paradox, even when it is most unruly.”

Those words reveal much about Johnson, who not only understood the complex paradox that drives a university, but embraced it. And he took to the work with a style of leadership peers describe as calm and reflective, fair and collegial, intuitive and intelligent—and always with an eye to the horizon, the greater good of Emory at heart.

For more than a decade, Johnson has helped guide Emory’s fate and future, his leadership offering a steady hand at a time when a global economic downturn and societal demands created very real challenges within American higher education.

To illustrate the enormity of the task, mentally flip backward through the pages of Emory’s recent history to the year 2000, when Johnson stepped in as board chair—the first Emory alumnus in that role in more than twenty years.

The to-do list had to be daunting: Appoint a new university president and help groom a new leadership team; expand—and diversify—the Board of Trustees; strengthen relationships with the Methodist Church; develop a university-wide strategic plan to guide Emory toward eminence, as well as a master plan, to steer campus development during the next decade; create a greener, more sustainable campus; engage faculty to take a greater role in university governance; launch the most ambitious fund-raising campaign in Emory’s history, raising $1.69 billion to support teaching, research, scholarship, patient care, and social action.

Looking back, Johnson recognizes these accomplishments as highlights of his tenure, but he’s quick to label them a team endeavor, pointing to the hard work of a critical network of trustees and administrators, alumni, faculty, and staff—a habit of smoothly deflecting credit that is very much his style, according to those who’ve served alongside him.

“He’s easily one of the best leaders I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” says Chilton Varner 76L, a partner with the Atlanta

l e f t: a n n b o r d e n ; r i g h t: c o u r t e s y o f b e n F. j o h n s o n III

Johnson with 2006 Commencement speaker Marian Wright Edelman and President Wagner

Three generations: Ben F. Johnson IV, Ben F. Johnson Jr., and Ben F. Johnson III

law firm King and Spalding, who was elected to the Emory Board of Trustees in 1995, the same year Johnson joined the board.

“He’s got solid judgment and always does his homework, researching any issues that might be controversial, then canvassing opinion leaders and those who will be deciding an issue long before the vote, taking everyone’s views into account,” says Varner, one of three Emory trustees who’ve recently transitioned to trustee emeritus status along with Johnson.

“And he’s one of the most unflappable people I’ve ever met. Everyone respects his judgment—of course, he always does the right thing, so that helps,” she adds, with a chuckle.

Many point to Johnson’s strength in nurturing strong relationships as a key to his success. For example, in Emory faculty, Johnson saw the potential for partnerships. So he helped create faculty counselor positions to serve on each of the major board committees—an opportunity for faculty engagement in university governance that would bring with it new eyes and insight.

In fact, Emory Trustee Douglas Ivester ascribes Johnson’s forwardlooking leadership with “setting in motion an altogether more modern way of approaching management of the university.”

“Ben set the clear expectation that leadership should be strong and creative, and it should be guided and supported by the Board of Trustees, not managed by it,” says Emory President James Wagner, who credits Johnson with seeing the board through an important expansion of both size and member diversity.

“His legacy is one of thoughtful, principled, and disciplined governance, unrestrained from challenging leadership to greater aspiration,” Wagner adds.

of leadership, he frequently met President Wagner and new Board Chair John Morgan here for their own casual eggs-and-issues-style breakfasts.

However, fellow Emory trustees insist that behind Johnson’s calm, laconic exterior—many compare him to Jimmy Stewart, others to Atticus Finch—is a whip-smart legal mind. They describe a man with fierce intellectual curiosity, deeply rooted community connections, and an intuitive grasp of both human nature and the delicate art of politics— all tempered with a bone-dry wit.

Once, during a board discussion about the possibility of a slogan or catchphrase to celebrate Emory’s 175th anniversary, Johnson wryly suggested: “Emory: 175 Years without a Bumper Sticker.”

Johnson himself acknowledges that his somber demeanor can be misleading. Perhaps, he suggests, his tombstone should someday read: “He enjoyed it more than he seemed.”

“I just happen to be born with a mournful visage,” he quips. “I’m not really a sad person.”

But as Johnson himself has observed, “sometimes the most effective change agent looks least like a change agent.”

Johnson honed his leadership skills as the managing partner of Alston and Bird, an Atlanta-based law firm frequently recognized as one of the nation’s top employers—winning a spot on Fortune magazine’s list of “The 100 Best Companies to Work For” for fifteen consecutive years.

“Even back in 1980, when I joined the [Alston and Bird] law firm, he was a budding leader,” says former Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears 80L, who has served on Emory’s Board of Trustees since 2010.

Years later, as a jurist on the Georgia Supreme Court, Sears would encounter Johnson again; this time he was one of the major forces behind a civil rights lawsuit that Alston and Bird was handling pro bono, she recalls.

“I’ll always remember him for standing up where many people wouldn’t stand up—standing up for things that really matter, in a way that some would shy away from,” Sears says. “He’s got a backbone made of steel.”

In his role as chair of Emory’s Board of Trustees, those strengths were obvious, she says: “You really have to work hard to lead. It’s not easy. You just have to plow deep, and he did it—at the same time, he was also involved with other leadership roles with many other civic groups throughout the community and the managing partner of his law firm.”

That passion for public service? “It runs in the family bloodline. You

Standing f or wh at m atter s Ask Johnson to discuss his own leadership philosophy, and it boils down to a simple notion: Surround yourself with brilliant people, then back off and let them be brilliant.

“A lot of the time, good leadership is knowing when to keep your mouth shut, when to collaborate, and when to get out of the way and let others do what they do best,” Johnson said recently over lunch at the General Muir, a restaurant his son and daughter-in-law helped launch earlier this year at the Emory Point development along Clifton Road.

Adorned with old family photographs, the thriving young business is yet another point of connection for Johnson, who often uses the restaurant as an informal satellite office; leading up to the transition

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know, it was his father who decided that Emory’s law school needed to enroll its first black student,” says Sears, who is herself African American, among a wave of women and minorities drawn to law schools in the late 1970s.

“Ben just took that mantle right up, that strong sense of service, of connection to the community,” she adds. “He’s a do-the-right-thing kind of guy, it’s just that simple.”

A fam ily le g ac y of c om muni ty service To understand the catalyst for community engagement that drives Ben F. Johnson III, it helps to understand his father—a pivotal force in his own life and a change agent for Emory.

Ben F. Johnson Jr. was born in 1914, before Emory had even established an Atlanta campus, and grew up in what would come to be known as the Virginia-Highland neighborhood.

The elder Johnson won a scholarship to attend Emory during his freshman year. By the following year, the Great Depression had taken its toll; Emory University—and others like it—could not continue to fund the scholarship, Johnson recalls.

So his father dropped out of college, working in a five-and-dime store to make ends meet, eventually attending classes through “the evening division of the University of Georgia,” now Georgia State University.

By his senior year, his father had enrolled at the University of Georgia, intent on studying Greek and Latin “because he wanted to go to law

New $2 Million Endowed Scholarship Honors Johnson As the Emory Board of Trustees convened for its annual meeting in November, retiring Board Chair Ben F. Johnson III knew the gathering would bring a formal transition of power, as new Board Chair John Morgan was elected to the top leadership position.

For the most part, the plan went as expected, with Johnson stepping into an emeritus trustee role after serving on the board since 1995, the last thirteen years as its chair.

What Johnson didn’t anticipate: An announcement of the creation of a $2 million endowed scholarship in his name in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences.

In support of both Johnson’s service to the university and the Emory Scholarship Endowment Initiative—which emphasizes scholarship endowment as a priority—the Board of Trustees revealed the new scholarship during a special tribute dinner in his honor.

Given Johnson’s intellectual curiosity, commitment to scholarship and his deep roots at Emory—his father, Ben F. Johnson Jr., was dean

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school,” Johnson says. “I think he was drawn to the law as an instrument of change and justice. I think I was drawn to the law because that’s what he did.”

After graduation, Johnson Jr. was accepted to attend law school at Harvard University. But due to his own father’s poor health, he elected to stay closer to home, enrolling instead at the Emory School of Law, where he graduated first in his class in 1939.

After practicing law with the Atlanta firm of Sutherland, Tuttle and Brennan, Johnson Jr. served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II. Returning home, “he decided what he really wanted to do was teach,” according to Johnson.

Johnson Jr. joined Emory’s law faculty in 1948, serving as dean of the School of Law from 1961 to 1973—a time of social and cultural upheaval throughout the American South, as the civil rights movement began to find its voice, leading Emory to a defining moment.

In 1962, Johnson Jr. joined Emory Board of Trustees Chair Henry Bowden Sr. 32C 34L in arguing a landmark legal case before the Georgia Supreme Court, successfully challenging a state law that denied tax exemptions to integrated private schools, even though the state had already desegregated public institutions.

In 1965, Emory admitted its first full-time African American law students: Marvin S. Arrington Sr. 67L, who would later become a Fulton County Superior Court judge, and Clarence Cooper 67L, who would go on to serve as US District Court Judge for the Northern District of Georgia. The following year, Johnson Jr. began seeking

of Emory Law from 1961 to 1973 and Johnson himself is a 1965 graduate of Emory College—an endowed scholarship was especially fitting, says Susan Cruse, senior vice president of development and alumni relations.

And the timing couldn’t be more appropriate, she adds.

Last fall, President James Wagner released a video message announcing that in order to ensure that Emory’s doors are open to all exceptional students, the university has begun an initiative to increase endowment funding for scholarships in every school.

“The Ben Johnson Scholarship Endowment is definitely part of the trustees’ commitment to scholarship endowment, which the university has designated as a top priority,” Cruse notes.

Support for the scholarship endowment “was initiated by the Emory Development and Communications subcommittee of the Board of Trustees,” she adds, a recommendation “that was embraced wholeheartedly by the full board.”

The announcement came as the culmination of an evening of warm reflection upon Johnson’s service and dedication, which included the presentation of a handcrafted set of bookends carved from Etowah Fleuri marble (also known as “Georgia Pink”) derived from a fountain that faced Asbury Circle in the 1950s and carved with

a scroll motif reflecting various elements of campus architecture.

Throughout the evening, Johnson was presented with a series of books “representing the breadth of the Emory community” to symbolically fill the marble bookends, said Rosemary Magee, former vice president and secretary of the university and director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. In the end, it was a collection that embodied the spirit, depth, and full reach of the liberal arts: books of poetry and music; law and public policy; nursing, public health, and medicine; theology; regional literature; and history.

Following the book presentations, trustees Sonny Deriso and Diane Savage announced that Johnson’s new scholarship would be initiated as a $2 million endowment by the Board of Trustees, “as a perpetual reminder of the wisdom, insight, and integrity with which you have led this board and inspired Emory to strive for excellence in everything we do.”

Since the announcement, additional gifts and pledges to the endowment have been received, bringing the total to more than $2,140,000 including matching funds, Cruse says.

To learn more about the Emory Scholarship Endowment Initiative, or to contribute to the Ben Johnson Scholarship Endowment, contact Cruse at scruse2@emory.edu.—Kimber Williams

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participating in the Barkley Forum and Interfoundation support for a fraternity Council to the Honor Council and program to help recruit an assortment of honor societies. At graduAfrican American law ation, Johnson received the Marion Luther students.

Brittain Service Award, the university’s highLooking back, Johnest student honor in recognition of service son openly acknowland leadership. edges the weight of his After graduating from Harvard Law School, father’s achievement: Johnson returned to Atlanta, joining Alston “He systematically and Bird in 1971 as a commercial litigator. He changed the world in also grew interested in Emory alumni activiwhich he lived.” ties and other, wider civic concerns, serving As for what comas board chair for the Atlanta Symphony pelled him? “My father Orchestra, Woodward Academy, and the taught Sunday School in YMCA of Metro Atlanta—as well as work with the Baptist Church for The Carter Center, Woodruff Arts Center, the over fifty years,” Johnson Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and explains. “He thought it Atlanta’s Midtown Alliance. was his mission to get “Frankly, I don’t know anybody with the people to think right.” range of civic and charitable contributions that That passion for Ben has made,” Varner observes. “It’s really kind engagement would of amazing when you think about it.” remain with Johnson Jr. In 1995, Johnson was asked to join the throughout his life. In Emory Board of Trustees as an alumni trustee. fact, not long before his The decision, he says, was easy. father’s death in 2006, “I came to realize that if I could be of help, I Johnson recalls stopping wanted to,” he recalls. to visit him en route to an Emory Board of Trustees meeting— The wise he art only to find his nearly Johnson and his wife, Ann A. Johnson 67C, at their home ninety-year-old father As vice president and secretary of the univerheading out the door. sity, Rosemary Magee 82PhD worked closely “You can’t stay for long, I’ve got to go,” Johnson Jr. cautioned. with Emory’s Board of Trustees around governance issues, helping set “Where are you going?” asked his son. to an agenda for Emory’s future.

“Well, I’m going to speak and demonstrate,” he responded, heading Through Johnson’s intuitive leadership, Magee says she’s come to see off to tackle yet another social injustice, primed to fight the good fight. him as the literal embodiment of “The Wise Heart”—words embedded Throughout his father’s final years, Johnson enjoyed taking him on in the Emory motto that “capture a sense of wisdom of the heart and all drives; together, they would chart the growth around Emory’s main the kinds of knowledge that we seek,” she explains. “I think that sums campus. Inevitably, Johnson Jr. would marvel at the changing landup his work and contribution and impulse.” scape, recalling how “this was just all woods when I was a kid.”

Over the years, the gift of wisdom would prove critical in lead“So Emory grew up with him,” Johnson explains. “And he was there ing Emory through times of conflict and challenge. During Johnson’s every step of the way for a long, long time.” watch, the university released a formal statement of regret for its historic ties to slavery, confronted a pattern of discrimination against Jewish students in its now-defunct School of Dentistry, and acknowledged I n de bt e d to E mory the discovery of misreported data to US News & World Report.

And yet, it was the university’s forthright response to those moments When it came time for Ben Johnson III to attend college, there was that fills Johnson with his greatest pride. “As a basic proposition, I say little question that the prospective English major would choose a you can’t be comfortable with yourself if you are estranged from your liberal arts education at Emory. past,” he says. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with that.”

By then, the university was practically extended family, with key Looking back over thirteen years, Ben Johnson III is comfortable campus leaders and faculty often dropping by the Johnson house for with his past—proud to have helped secure a leader like President dinner and dialogue. And with his father on faculty, Johnson was able Wagner; to have witnessed the growth of both campus improvements to attend Emory on full scholarship. and the impact of Emory Advantage, a financial aid initiative that has Academically, “it was like being a kid in a cafeteria with an unlimenriched Emory’s student body; pleased to have been able to give back ited allowance,” Johnson recalls. “I felt deeply indebted.” to a university that has given him so much.

Johnson pauses. “Actually,” he says, “if you want to know the greatest If the life of a university is fundamentally “an unruly paradox,” reason why I feel indebted to Emory, it’s because I met Ann here.”

Johnson found a way not to conquer it, but to appreciate it, to harness It was the fall of 1963—fifty years ago this semester. “She had joined it, to shape it. the Emory Women’s Chorale and there was a student event I was Not only did he understand that complicated dynamic, Johnson supposed to have some role in, and there she was, the most beautiful simply stood back, and with his own wise heart, allowed that very force woman I had ever seen,” he recalls. “We started dating and have been to help Emory grow and thrive and become—in the end, perhaps his together ever since.” greatest gift of all.

Johnson immersed himself fully into the Emory experience, from winter 2014

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caffeine h

igh in the chill, mist-blown mountains of northern Nicaragua, on a farm called Finca El Peten, more than 175,000 low, leafy plants are silently toiling to fulfill their biological destiny: producing bright red coffee cherries.

It’s an uphill battle. Blight, bugs, soil composition, rainfall, temperature—a whole host of dangers lurks in the shadows of the surrounding shade trees, ready to divert the plants’ patient progress. If they do yield healthy, ripened coffee cherries, it’s probably a good thing the plants cannot know what’s in store for their colorful offspring: the picking, milling, drying, shipping, roasting, and eventually grinding— likely passing through some thirty pairs of human hands—that will transform their beans into a very, very fine cup of coffee.

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This is the farm of Jon Thompson, an Atlanta native who bought these 250 acres with business partners in 2007 to pursue a grand social experiment. Now El Peten produces coffee for distribution through Farmers to 40, a business launched in Emory’s Goizueta Business School as part of a program called Social Enterprise @ Goizueta. The ambition of Farmers to 40 is to return 40 percent of the retail price of each bag of coffee to its Nicaraguan partner farmers, compared to the much lower percentage they typically receive—an aspiration as lofty as the mountains, a thousand feet above sea level, where this coffee grows.

Being the brainchild of the business school, Social Enterprise @ Goizueta is not a purely altruistic endeavor, but a blend of public service and for-profit savvy; it’s designed to apply business practices and market solutions to achieve positive social impact. Program founder and director Peter Roberts, professor of organization and management,

fix

How a Goizueta Business School experiment is connecting American coffee drinkers with Nicaraguan coffee growers— one bag of beans at a time

by Paige Parvin 96G p h oto s b y b r ya n c l a r k

says the idea is to engage faculty and students in working across the spectrum of for-profit, nonprofit, and hybrid organizations. The coffee industry—notorious for leaving the growers themselves out in the cold, financially speaking—presents a perfect testing ground.

“I’ve always had an interest in coffee,” Roberts says. “And I’ve come to understand why the farmer gets shafted. In the wine industry, where folks also pay a lot for premium products, the vineyards and the wineries are colocated out of necessity—grapes can’t travel long distances. A huge problem for coffee growers is that they are so geographically and financially removed from the later-stage business processes.”

Since 2010, Social Enterprise @ Goizueta has been bringing groups of business students to Nicaragua to expose them to the range of developmental issues facing the region and to help them envision solutions.

Coffee is not the sole focus; in addition to purchasing the farm six years

ago, Thompson cofounded the nonprofit Comunidad Connect to facilitate community building and development. The Goizueta program now partners with Comunidad Connect on various projects, including the Nicaragua Community Health Connection, the first health clinic for the town of Los Robles, now near completion.

And in November, a small group of Emory alumni and friends joined the first Coffee Community Connection Tour, an educational trip focused on the challenges of coffee production and the need for efforts such as Farmers to 40. Roberts hopes that trips like these might help bridge the yawning chasm between Nicaraguan coffee growers and American coffee drinkers.

“If people like coffee, shouldn’t they want to know more about it and the communities where it comes from?” he says. “What’s wrong with touring coffee farms like vineyards?”

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t’s breakfast time at Finca El Peten, and a handful of guests are playing a friendly game of get-to-know-you over farmfresh eggs and fruit. Outside, low clouds drift over a serene offshoot of Lake Apanas, a massive lake that generates about one-fifth of Nicaragua’s electric power.

Alumni who have joined the Emory trip include Alicia Philipp 75C, president of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, who has been a mover in the nonprofit world for more than thirty-five years. Under her leadership, the Community Foundation has grown into the foremost grant-making organization in the Southeast. An Emory Medalist and one of the university’s 175 Makers of History named in honor of the 175th anniversary, Philipp is also spearheading another partnership with Social Enterprise @ Goizueta that eventually will create new “green” jobs in Atlanta by providing locally grown produce to businesses and organizations.

This morning, though, she’s lacing up her hiking boots and getting ready to learn something about coffee. “I’m really interested in social enterprise and also in Central America,” she says. “I hope to live here in the next phase of my life.”

Coincidentally, the two other Emory graduates who have joined the group—Bridget Booth 80C and Linda Jameson 02EMBA—have recently left behind successful business careers and are starting that next phase. Both are interested in exploring social development in disadvantaged communities, in the US and abroad.

“I am in career transition, and I’m interested in the sort of work that Social Enterprise @ Goizueta is doing,” Jameson says. “I had met Peter through a business school connection, and when I learned about this trip I thought it would be a great way to check it out.”

Thompson—whose sister, Kore Breault, is senior associate director of development for Goizueta—gives his guests an overview of his background with Comunidad Connect and Farmers to 40. A former social

from bean to brew:

Young coffee plants take about three years to fully begin to produce, and once mature, they need to flower three different times each season before their beans are ready for picking. Those not grown in shade require chemical fertilizers and pesticides in order to bear fruit.

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Coffee pickers are paid by the pounds of beans they deliver to the wet mill, and they work hard to pick mostly the bright red beans, which are the highest quality. Pickers can gather up to seventy-five pounds of coffee a day during the harvest season, which lasts about three to four months.

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worker, Thompson first came to Nicaragua in 1998 and met his wife, Arelis, while visiting San Juan del Sur on the southern coast. Cofounding Comunidad Connect and buying Finca El Peten, he says, was “a chance to combine my passion for social work with stewardship of the environment and do something positive here. It was a way to develop

At El Peten’s wet mill, freshly picked beans are sorted, soaked, de-pulped, and then fermented for roughly twenty hours before they are loaded for transport to their next stop. By the time the beans are roasted and ready for brewing in the US, they will have lost some 80 percent of their original weight and volume.

At the dry mills scattered throughout Nicaragua, individual “lots” of coffee beans are received, weighed, inspected, and spread on the ground to dry in the sun for about a week—until they reach the optimal humidity of 13 percent. Machinery then cleans them before a monthlong period of bagged “repose.”

After the dry mill process is complete, coffee beans are green once again; these dried, light-green beans can be stored for months before being roasted. It is estimated that coffee beans pass through thirty pairs of human hands during eight different processes before being ground and brewed for your morning cup.

back to n at u r e : Coffee farmer Jon Thompson (above, front left) and Emory alumna Alicia Philipp lead the pack on a tour of the farm.

long-term relationships with these communities and create permanent jobs for farmers.”

Now Thompson divides his time between Nicaragua and Atlanta, working to expand the reach of Comunidad Connect around the country and to increase El Peten’s coffee production, quality, and local impact. Since he purchased the farm in 2007, its full-time staff has increased from two to thirty, and they have planted more than sixty thousand new trees—all with the aim of revitalizing the former cattle farm to yield organic coffee that doesn’t need chemicals or pesticides because it’s grown as nature intended: in shade. Thompson’s team also had an old stable converted into rustic dormitory-style accommodations; he describes his vision for El Peten, the largest organic coffee farm in the country, as both a working farm and a center for education, training, and sharing knowledge.

“Our farm’s processes are rooted in a commitment to the soil that nurtures the coffee plants and to the canopy that protects them,” Thompson explains. “Our practices apply ‘permaculture’ techniques to encourage the appropriate biodiversity in the ecosystem. A critical part of this is developing the canopy that provides shade for our plants, while encouraging the right mix of birds and insects. Permaculture is not so much a project as a way of life.”

Thompson leads the Emory group on a walking tour of El Peten, which grows organic vegetables, fruits, and medicinal herbs as well as coffee. In the roomy chicken coop, water fountains made from twoliter Coke bottles suspended upside down offer a coy glimpse of home.

As the guests pick their way along the rutted, muddy path, Thompson

points out new growth of the hardy elqueme trees ideal for providing shade, healthy coffee plants with berries in various stages of ripening, and farming challenges such as the “coffee rust” or reddish-brown rash on the leaves that indicates the presence of harmful spores.

“We lost a third of the crop to this blight last year,” he says.

At the farm’s wet mill—the first of many stops for freshly picked beans—Thompson and Dariel Potoy, executive director of winter 2014

milling around: Dariel Potoy (above from left) and Rosa Villagra of Finca El Peten, with Emory’s Peter Roberts, describe the wet mill process to alumnae Bridget Booth and Alicia Philipp; water pushes coffee beans through this chute for soaking and de-pulping.

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c o n s ta n t gardener: Byron Corrales (left, on right) explains his methods to visitors Angie Allen (far left) and Tania Herbert; members of the coffee co-op (below) show their stuff.

Comunidad Connect, fire up the machinery with a roar, explaining the multifaceted process the beans undergo here before they are loaded up for transport to be sun dried at a dry mill. It is customary for the coffee producers themselves to accompany the loads, or lots, of beans to the dry mills located to the south, where they are weighed and inspected for various quality indicators. Thompson and farm administrator Rosa Villagra, one of many Nicaraguan women emerging as leaders in the country’s biggest business, typically handle this important step.

This is the beginning of the harvest season, which will last about three to four months. At the height of picking, Thompson hopes the farm will yield about two thousand pounds of coffee each day and twenty-five thousand for the year.

“Every step along the way could compromise the quality of the coffee,” Thompson says. “Beans can be over-fermented, over-roasted, even transported in a dirty truck that will affect how they smell and taste. It’s a high-risk process.”

Thompson’s team learned much of what they know about coffee production from his friend and mentor Byron Corrales, a near-legendary Nicaraguan coffee farmer internationally known for his awardwinning “Maracaturra” coffee. A highlight of the trip for the Emory group is visiting Corrales’s farm, Finca Los Pinos, which is operated according to the natural growing techniques and processes developed by his family over multiple generations.

A strong connection has flowered between El Peten and Los Pinos, driven by a shared commitment to sustainable farming and to engaging the surrounding communities and farms in beneficial relationships.

Finca Los Pinos produces the only other coffee currently available through the Farmers to 40 program, although Emory’s Roberts hopes to expand that network to include other organic farmers.

Corrales’s genius for coffee farming lies chiefly in his approach to soil conditioning. Rather than using costly chemicals to strip the earth 30

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of microorganisms, he does the opposite—enriching the soil with a home-grown fertilizer, made by blending rock dust with waste from cows that are fed an all-natural diet of grass, sugarcane, and other plants. Corrales’s special family recipe for bocachi, or fertilizer, is largely credited for the high quality of his coffee, and Thompson has begun to adopt it on his farm as well.

w h at b o o t s a r e m a d e f o r : Goizueta graduate Linda Jameson (above), a frequent traveler, explores Finca El Peten.

“It is not correct that production through agrochemicals is the solution. The industry that practices agriculture at such a high cost is in crisis,” Corrales says. “The real truth is that productivity comes from the earth itself.”

Finca Los Pinos is one of fifty-two members of a local farming co-op that collectively produces about eight hundred thousand pounds of coffee for sale and export each year, and Corrales is encouraged to see an increasing number of these and other Nicaraguan farms moving away from agrochemicals. His daughter, Sara, is pursuing a degree in business and will assume a leading role in running the farm.

The Emory visitors also are treated to a coffee “cupping.” Much like a wine tasting, a cupping is a meticulous, step-by-step sampling guided by a professionally trained Q-rater, or cupper, who has the expertise to score the coffee’s quality according to international standards of taste, aroma, acidity, and other factors.

Another positive development for Nicaraguan coffee farmers is a growing number of professional cuppers in the country who are able to both educate local growers about raising their quality, and to influence the market on the Nicaraguan side, before the beans are exported.

Several members of the co-op are on hand to meet the American guests, putting faces and names with the coffees that are being tasted.

And that, says Roberts, is the soul of this tour and of Farmers to 40—creating a connection between product and people.

“The concept is to remain connected through the cup of coffee,” Corrales says. “So when you drink this coffee in the US, you think about the community where it came from. You understand that behind that coffee are farmers, families, homes, and schools.”

s part of the ­Coffee Connection trip, the Emory group participated in a service project—mixing and pouring a concrete floor for this Nicaraguan family. During the course of the afternoon, Roberts connected with daughter Vanessa Blandon Rivera, one of the eight family members living in the three-room house, who was selected to attend courses in agribusiness at La Bastille Technical School of Agriculture based on a business proposal she created.

She hopes to develop

an enclosed nursery for large-scale production of vegetables and plants; she has the model, she tells Roberts, she only needs the funding. “We happen to have business students who are interested in microlending for start-up businesses,” Roberts tells her, asking her to email him her proposal when she can access a computer. “I very much look forward to seeing your plan.”

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armers to 40 officially began offering coffee through its website in late October; when the Coffee Connection trip departed, the business had sold forty-eight bags of beans. Now the program is shipping nearly two hundred bags a month. The goal, says Roberts, is to sell about three to five hundred monthly, with the farmer and community receiving $4 for each $10 bag—compared to the regular market, where their take can be as low as forty cents.

“Forty percent is aspirational,” he says. “But we’d like to develop levels of certification that are more transparent than the current fair trade model, which is clearly a step in the right direction but doesn’t give the consumer any real idea of how much the farmer is getting. We want more of the money to stay in coffee communities. By bringing our Nicaraguan partners closer to their consumers, our hope is that, ultimately, they will have more ownership in their own business affairs.”

Karen Boomer 12B, now a senior analyst in revenue management with Delta, is proud of Farmers to 40’s progress in the time since she helped get it started. The business model was developed with the help of undergraduates in Roberts’s classes; students also worked on the marketing plan, website, and fulfillment system.

“When I started working on Farmers to 40, it was still just an idea,” Boomer says. “Peter had extensive knowledge about the global coffee community, a great connection to the farm in Nicaragua, and the support of Social Enterprise @ Goizueta. My task was to turn all these great ideas and connections into a fully functioning social business.”

Boomer has remained involved with the program, serving as a resource for students who picked up where she left off. “I enjoy meeting current Emory students and other like-minded alumni who are interested in supporting causes like this,” she says.

Like-minded alumni, in turn, are inspired by young women like Boomer. “I think the main impact of the trip for me,” says Emory alumna Philipp, “is my complete faith and belief in the next generation. From Rosa on Jon’s farm, to Byron’s daughter who is going into farming—it’s just so impressive to see their motivation. This is what I hope and believe Emory is doing—producing students who are aware and engaged in the world.”

Booth likens the Coffee Connection trip to a crash course in the concept behind Social Enterprise @ ­Goizueta itself—the blending of for-profit and nonprofit business practices for social good.

“It was an exceptional experience to stimulate thinking beyond serving as a member of a board of directors of nonprofits to applying business skills to social issues,” she says.

For Boomer, her blue-sky research project from business school has blossomed into a tangible product that she continues to touch—and taste.

“Every month I get so excited when I see a fresh bag of coffee delivered to my door,” she says. “It brings me back to my time at Emory and to the farmers I visited in ­Nicaragua.” winter 2014

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The Kids Are All Bright

story by madison lampert 15c

At E m o r y, S e r i o u s r esea r c h i s n ot

and

j u s t f o r fac u lt y a n d g r a d s t u d e n t s .

pa i g e pa r v i n 9 6 g

Mee t a Fe w u n d e r g r a d u at es w h o C o u l d n ’ t Wa i t to Ge t S ta r t e d

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photos by k ay h i n to n

Jessica elinburg 15C

chemistry major

fac u lt y a dv i se r : Co r a M ac B e t h , ass i s ta n t d ea n o f s t u d e n t a f fa i r s , La n e y G r a d uat e S c h o o l

R e s e a r c h Synthetic inorganic chemistry; sponsor: National Science Foundation Center for Selection C-H Functionalization and Clare Boothe Luce Fellowship grant, and Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory (SIRE) R e aso n Entering Emory, join-

ing a research laboratory was a definite goal of mine. I’ve always loved science, and after interning in the medical field in high school, I knew medicine was

not the path for me. Naturally, I began to think about other scientific career options and began considering research. Once I joined the MacBeth group, I was instantly hooked!

Res ults My research involves synthesizing new types of ­catalysts to activate carbonhydrogen bonds. These catalysts integrate abundant earth metals such as zinc, cobalt, and iron, instead of the highly expen-

sive, rare metals that current catalysts use (such as palladium, rhodium, iridium). Hopefully, the catalysts we make will not only be efficient, but also significantly less expensive and more environmentally friendly than those currently used.

Rewa r ds I love the problemsolving aspect of research. For example, when a reaction yields unexpected results, there are so many tools you can utilize to figure out what happened. Using these tools to find an answer can be an exhausting, but rewarding, process. It’s literally a chemical treasure hunt! This summer, I was fortunate to continue my

research project through a generous grant from the National Science Foundation’s Center for Selection C-H Functionalization and the Clare Boothe Luce Fellowship.

Rea l life This summer, I spent ten weeks with the Borovik Group at the University of California, Irvine, utilizing specialized technology in their lab to gain essential information about the catalysts I’ve made here at Emory. I made great friends with my fellow lab members and learned so much about characterizing chemical compounds.

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Logun with Howell

Jake Krako Fac u lt y A dv i se r : T i m M c D o n o u g h , c h a i r , De pa r t m e n t o f T h eat e r S t u d i es ; p r o f ess o r o f t h eat e r a n d da n c e

Resea r ch Theater production, dramaturgy, acting, directing, marketing, management, and design on an independent production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; sponsor: SIRE Reason I wanted to participate in undergraduate research at Emory to evocatively demonstrate that the research done in the arts is valid, valuable, and as deserving of support as “traditional” academic research.

meghan logun 14C

biology major

Fac u lt y A dv i se r : l e o n a r d H ow e l l , c h i e f, D i v i s i o n o f Ne u r o p h a r m aco lo gy a n d

Resu lts This summer, Seth Langer 11C, my primary collaborator, and I independently produced Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Atlanta. My collaborators and I wanted to know: can a group of young artists, working on a shoestring budget, not housed by an established name or company,

Ne u r o lo g i c D i seases , Ye r k es Nat i o n a l P r i m at e Reseac h Ce n t e r ; p r o f ess o r o f p syc h i at ry a n d b e h av i o r a l s c i e n c es

R e s e a r c h The behavioral pharmacology of MDMA (“ecstasy”) R e aso n I had really enjoyed all of the lab classes I had taken at Emory so I thought that I would enjoy helping in research. I was drawn to Yerkes specifically because of the opportunity to work with laboratory animals, and one of my friends who was working here at the time said nothing but great things about her experience.

R e s ults We are looking at how different doses of MDMA change social behavior in squirrel monkeys. MDMA is a popular recreational drug, and there is still so much that we have to learn about how it changes brain chemistry and behavior. My hope for this project would be that it contributes to our knowledge of the neurochemical mechanisms of MDMA that cause changes in behavior, and ultimately one day contributes to helping create therapeutic options for abusers of stimulants.

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Rewa r ds My favorite part would be working with the squirrel monkeys, because they have really interesting behaviors and personalities. Working with the nonhuman primates in a renowned research facility through Emory is an amazing experience that I don’t think many undergraduate students get the chance to do.

Real life Working with the squirrel monkeys has been memorable in itself, but I cannot forget my first time walking into the colony to meet them. The monkeys were all riled up because they knew that someone new was in the room, but that was when I learned the power of keeping treats in your pockets. They quiet right down when there is sugar up for grabs!

successfully produce a work of theater and reach a community. Seth and I codirected, coproduced, and designed, working with half a dozen fellow artists. Our goal was to create a work that was shaped and framed in every element by a cohesive, interconnected aesthetic and methodological consis-

ovsky 14c theater studies major

tency. This project was successful, and that success indicates that we have only just begun. More than three hundred people attended our six performances, diverse audiences consisting of college students and professors, local artists, and Atlantans of various ages and social spheres. Thus begins the great experiment of discovering new forms, creating new production methodologies, and ushering forth new conceptions of how theater can be made in the twenty-first century.

Rewards The most satisfying part of this research was experiencing the fruition of an art project so long in the making, and sharing it with our friends, family, and community. I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to the Department of Theater Studies. This project began as a class assignment that Seth and I worked on together for Tim McDonough’s Developing a Role course in spring 2011. We developed the piece further in Theater Emory’s summer Breaking Ground series.

SIRE provided me with the support I needed to fully realize the project this past summer.

R e a l l ife

Countless flashes of that sudden, shocking realization—oh wow, this is really going to happen! Every time a design solution was discovered, a marketing connection came through, an actor had a performance epiphany—those fleeting flashes of satisfaction and recognition keep you going.

Casey Anthony 14OX Katharine Roland 14OX Asumi Suguro 14OX chemistry majors

Fac u lt y A dv i se r : N i c h o l e P ow e l l , ass i s ta n t P r o f ess o r o f c h e m i s t ry, ox f o r d co l l e g e

Resea r ch Chalcones/ chalcone derivatives and their pharmacological effects Reason I wanted to take advantage of the unique research opportunities Oxford has for its undergraduate students, and to build the intellectual curiosity and skill needed for success in scientific research—as well as to begin to apply classroom concepts in a laboratory setting as I will after my undergraduate career. (CA) Resu lts The goal of our research is to synthesize chalcones and chalcone derivatives, which will then be examined for their anti-cancer properties. We hope to correctly synthesize the chalcones and improve our technique in order to obtain greater yields. (KR) Rewa r ds This research gave me the chance to practice lab techniques I learned from other classes. Because of the research, not only has my technique greatly improved, but my passion for chemistry and research has been enhanced, too.

(AS) I made two great friends, and we were able to help each other and exchange ideas. Having the opportunity to conduct research has allowed me to learn that chemistry is my niche and explore what the field has to offer. (KR) Building a

connection with a professor in my field of study is incredibly beneficial for networking and researchrelated advice, but I also have a close mentor who often serves as a source of inspiration for innovation, discovery, and motivation in the research field. (CA) Rea l life A memorable moment is the first time Casey, Angela, and I first tried to synthesize a chalcone. We did not succeed at first, but we learned from our mistakes. Moreover, that day is when we really bonded and developed a friendship. (KR)

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Hannah Chen 14C chemistry and economics double major Fac u lt y a dv i se r : S t e fa n L u t z , ass o c i at e p r o f ess o r o f c h e m i s t ry

R e s e a r c h Biochemistry study focused on protein engineering with therapeutic applications; sponsors: International Research Experience for Science Students (IRES), Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE), and SIRE R e aso n I’ve always had an aptitude for science and an interest in applying what I learned in the classroom to realworld applications. This is why before I even arrived at Emory as a freshman, I had already contacted professors with whom I was interested in conducting research. Research was one of the first extracurriculars I became involved with at Emory, and it has remained a consistent theme since I first stepped into the Lutz lab within the first week of beginning my college experience.

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Res u lts My research in Dr. Lutz’s laboratory has focused on protein engineering with therapeutic applications. Currently, we are interested in designing kinases to selectively activate positron emission tomography (PET) imaging probes to serve as reporter genes in the promising field of gene therapy. We hope to engineer the substrate specificity of human deoxycytidine kinase to serve as a reporter gene and as an imaging agent in PET imaging.

Rewa r ds Research has been one of the defining activities of my time at Emory so far. My favorite part of my research experience is just seeing how much I’ve grown. I’ve not only gained knowledge about protein structure and how to manipulate enzymatic function, but I’ve also improved valuable skills such as critical thinking and problem solving. I am more confident in my skills and better at effectively communicating science to a broader audience. My laboratory environment; research mentors; and Emory’s research programs including SURE, SIRE, and IRES have definitely helped foster that intellectual growth by challenging me to improve and practice my communication skills.

Real life My interest in research brought me to Munich, Germany, this past summer through the IRES program at Emory and the DAAD-RISE German academic exchange program. I worked at the University of Munich for ten weeks examining the thermostability of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. This was an incredible experience that threw me into a completely different research environment where I learned many new protein analytical techniques, made wonderful friends, explored German culture, and connected with many diverse people throughout Europe. The PhD and master’s students in the lab were so welcoming and introduced me to new laboratory techniques and German cultural traditions. It was definitely an unforgettable summer!

Meyersohn (right) with Crespino

Nathaniel Meyersohn 15C US history major

Fac u lt y a dv i se r : J o s e p h C r e sp i n o , ass o c i at e p r o f ess o r o f h i s to ry

R e s e a r c h Religion and race in twentieth-century Atlanta; sponsor: SIRE summer program (now serves as a peer mentor) R e aso n I was excited to serve as Professor Crespino’s undergraduate research assistant for many reasons. I was very interested in the civil rights movement, and the research allowed me to study the period and explore Atlanta’s tumultuous civil rights struggle. Working for Professor Crespino also helped me gain a better understanding of how historians conduct their research and arrive at conclusions, tools that will benefit me when I begin my own honors thesis. Finally, I took Professor Crespino’s course on Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, as well as his class on the 1960s, and the research has given me the opportunity to continue working closely with him.

Resu lts Professor Crespino asked me to comb through the archives of the Atlanta Constitution to help his understanding of leading white and black ministers’ influence on the city’s racial and religious crisis. My research has provided him with valuable examples of white pastors’ struggles to confront racial issues, and black ministers’ crucial leadership roles in the fight for equality. White religious leaders wrestled with their moral conscience over segregation, and they often faced criticism for their reluctance to challenge Jim Crow laws and attitudes. The Constitution also gave prominence to local black pastors’ role in Atlanta’s civil rights struggle. Internal disagreements within the movement arose, especially among older and younger black leaders, and the newspaper often reported contention between the two groups.

Rewa r ds My favorite part of the research has been working in close consultation with Professor Crespino, who is a remarkable mentor and teacher.

Rea l life One day, I came across an article about a contingent of Northern ministers who marched with Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1961 Albany Movement. Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett arrested the ministers for disturbing the peace, including a pastor from New York City named Rev. Norman Eddy. I’m a close friend of the late Rev. Eddy’s daughter, Martha, and I was thrilled to share my findings with her. winter 2014

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Hadar Naftalovich 14C psychology major, visual arts minor

Fac u lt y a dv i se r : P h i l l i p Wo l f f , ass o c i at e p r o f ess o r o f p syc h o lo gy

Resea r ch Study of causal illusions in Dr. Wolff’s Mind and Language Lab; sponsor: SIRE summer program Reason I love to learn. At Emory, I am surrounded by a wealth of knowledge inside and outside of the classroom.

The exposure to the research being conducted here showed me the opportunity to learn on a deeper level by allowing me to observe some of the discoveries being made and to discover new topics as well.

The more I was exposed to it,

blake mayes 14c

religion major

fac u lt y a dv i se r : B o bb i Pat t e r s o n , p r o f ess o r o f p e dag o gy, De pa r t m e n t o f Re l i g i o n

R e s e a r c h The future of ­Christian monasteries; sponsor: SIRE grant R e aso n Having studied the Christian monastic tradition at Emory, I wanted to experience firsthand the ways the tradition was changing and adapting to modern life.

I set out to study the rituals, sacred spaces, and rules of life at four Christian monasteries in Western Europe, analyzing the ways that they have adapted traditional beliefs and practices in secularizing Europe.

R e s ults The four communities researched place a focus on shared practices rather than shared beliefs, allowing diverse theological beliefs to coexist. This focus on common work for justice rather than traditional focuses on doctrinal commitments would signal a fundamental shift in

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the definition of insiders and outsiders in religious communities. I hope the research will highlight the innovative ways monasteries are adjusting to modern life and welcoming those who do not share their Christian beliefs.

Re wards My favorite part was getting to live at the places I was researching, which wouldn’t have been possible without the Emory SIRE Summer Research Grant. I was able to live and work alongside monks in all four communities, getting a firsthand experience of their common life in ways I never imagined before I came to Emory.

Re al li fe To study the ways East Belfast Mission was seeking to provide healthy food to a low-income community, I worked in their cafe for several weeks, interviewing former paramilitary leaders and local residents about the ways the political climate had changed in the neighborhood because of the work of the mission.

the more I knew I had to be a part of it.

Resu lts Imagine that your friend asks you if you got the job you recently interviewed for. You respond that you hope so, and quickly knock on wood to prevent any bad luck that could arise from that statement. Do you truly believe that knocking on wood prevented the bad luck?

Causal illusions are situations in which a causal relationship is inferred when there is no possible mechanism to vali-

date that relationship. In order to study the formation and characteristics of causal illusions, we needed to provide participants with situations analogous to real-life scenarios and measure their false causeeffect beliefs. We created two sets of animations, one focusing on a tray filled with water and the other focusing on a watch on a chain. With these animations, we manipulated contact, direction, and motion to create situations where a causal relationship was clearly present (such as a hand hitting a tray with water and a ripple occurring on the same side that the hand made contact on) and ones where the causal relationship was false (such as the hand failing to hit the tray and a ripple still emerging, but from the opposite side from which the hand moved). We predicted that causal illusions are formed when people infer forces, even when the forces are illegitimate. If our hypoth-

esis is correct, the ratings of causation would be strongest when contact, movement, and direction matched and weakest with no movement.

Also, if there were sufficient evidence for a causal connection (such as movement) but no mechanism to validate that connection (no contact) there will be a stronger rating of causation when direction matched. Our results supported our hypothesis for both sets of animations.

Rewards Through my research I hope to better understand the processes that allow causal illusions to form and find ways to apply that knowledge to preventing these illusions from getting out of hand, as can sometimes occur in people with paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or depression. My favorite part about doing this research is that I am able to use my art skills to advance my

knowledge of psychology and use my pursuit of knowledge in psychology to advance my art skills.

Rea l life The idea that I would be creating animations with professional software used to create video games, not for my art class, but for research in a lab, is an amazing

one that Emory has made it possible for me to pursue. I believe that had I attended a different university, there is a good chance I would never have discovered the possibility of combining art and psychology in such a seamless way.

Bhavya Paranthaman 17C

neuroscience and behavioral biology major

fac u lt y a dv i se r : M a r i e - C l au d e P e r r e au lt , ass i s ta n t p r o f ess o r o f p h ys i o lo gy, S c h o o l o f Me d i c i n e

Res earch Neuroscience project in the Department of Physiology in the School of Medicine; sponsor: SIRE (now serves as a research partner) Reas o n I’ve always been interested in pursuing a

career in the medical field, and through the SIRE program I have noticed the key role research and development plays at Emory; any advancement in research can directly make a positive impact on society.

Res ults The goal of my research is to create successful three-dimensional reconstructions of the morphology of various types of neurons in the mouse spinal cord.

Rewards My favorite part about doing neuro­ science research is following the process of how the research being done at Emory’s School of Medicine

can be translated into solutions for current medical conditions.

Rea l life Initially when working in the lab, I was overwhelmed with the amount of new information given to me and was intimidated by the doctors and graduate students who were more experienced than me. I had a memorable moment when I had asked a question of the postdoctoral fellow working with me.

She simply told me that she did not know the answer to my question and proceeded to figure it out. In that instant, I realized that researchers, whether a freshman undergraduate student or a postdoctoral fellow, are always solving problems or learning something new. This moment shed light on the fact that through research, individuals will never stop learning, which I find extremely exciting.

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Beyond Black & White In 1962, when Emory won the legal right to integrate through a landmark Georgia Supreme Court decision, diversity seemed as simple as black and white.

More than fifty years later, diversity goes far beyond race as universities struggle to attract the best students from all backgrounds.

Ben Johnson Jr. 36C 40L was dean of Emory’s School of Law when he and thenEmory general counsel Henry Bowden Sr. 32C 34L argued the case that integrated Georgia’s private universities, successfully suing to overturn restrictive provisions of the state’s constitution.

The School of Law is proud of the legacy the case carries, and diversity among law classes is 40

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by maria l ameir as

a priority for Dean Robert Schapiro. However, he says, the concept of diversity is much broader than in the past.

“Diversity has many dimensions—race, gender, socioeconomic background, international origin, values, beliefs,” Schapiro says. “People approach issues from different perspectives according to their histories in general, and that is especially so in law school.

Here our students examine important issues of public policy, and discussions are characterized by divergent opinions. Education is better when undertaken in that environment.”

Ethan Rosenzweig, assistant dean of admission at Emory Law, said the school is “decades ahead” of other schools in terms of diversity.

“During World War II, Emory was a very small, local law school. After the war, Emory embraced the WWII veterans coming back from the war, and that influx of students is really what made Emory a full-time law school,” Rosenzweig says. “We were out ahead of the pack then, and it was the same with integration in the early 1960s. When we are recruiting diverse students, we are not asking them to be pioneers. We are asking them to continue and add to a two-generation legacy.”

This year, Emory Law appointed Emily Liu as diversity liaison in the school’s Center for Professional Development and Career Strategy.

She helps connect Emory Law students with diversity opportunities in the legal sector and is

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At E mo r y L aw, d i v e r s i t y i s mo r e t h a n a b u z z wo r d

Kedar Bhatia: “Working with students with different personalities and backgrounds from different places is a lot like what you see when you are working at a large law firm in a large metropolitan area. At Emory Law I had classmates from all over the country and from other countries.”

B h at i a : C o u r t e s y o f E m o r y L a w

Henry Bowden Sr.

Ben F. Johnson Jr.

liaison to the school’s affinity groups, including the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), the Latin American Law Students Association (LALSA), the Asian American Law Students Association (AALSA), the South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA), and OUTLaw (Emory Law’s LGBT organization).

Lydia Russo, assistant dean for professional development and career strategy, says the position of diversity liaison is unique when it comes to law school career offices.

“We created the role of diversity liaison to give Emory Law’s diverse students every possible opportunity to position themselves for success with private and public sector employers,” Russo says.

Liu has received an overwhelming positive response from the legal community.

“Thanks to Emily’s national outreach efforts, the center has connected Emory Law students with countless diversity initiatives sponsored by individual employers, bar associations, and other professional associations,” says Russo. In addition to generating job opportunities, Liu has helped facilitate mentorship programs for students. For example, the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity (LCLD) recently launched its 2013–2014 Success in Law School Mentoring Program for first-year students at Emory Law. Liu worked with the LCLD to match twenty diverse first-year law students with local attorney mentors who will guide them during law school and beyond.

“In the past ten years, the recruitment of diverse students has been more important than ever because employers demand it,” Rosenzweig says. “Today’s sophisticated legal clients, entities, and associations want lawyers who come from and understand diverse backgrounds. It is important that we have a community of students here that reflects the larger client populations that they will represent.”

In September, Thad Kodish 00L was installed as president of the Emory Law Alumni Board.

He knows Emory Law’s student enrollment statistics—14 percent Asian, 7 percent African

American, 7 percent Hispanic, 3 percent multiethnic, and 69 percent white with a nearly even split between male and female—but understands that the diversity the school is trying to achieve exceeds those definitions.

As a managing principal at a large law firm, Kodish says, “I can’t place a high enough value on recruiting legal talent with varying backgrounds and perspectives, who have good experience and keen instincts on how to interact with a diverse array of people. When I attended Emory Law in the late nineties, as I know is the case today, students from all walks of life contributed to the classroom discussions.

The exposure to those varying perspectives and approaches to legal analysis doesn’t just teach you about the law, it gives you invaluable insights on how future judges, clients, adversaries, and codefendants will see things through their own personal prisms.”

After graduating from the law school, Rob Henrikson 72L went to work for MetLife as a management trainee in Decatur. During the next thirty-two years he worked his way up through the company, and in 2004 he was named president, chairman, and chief operating officer. Two years later he was made CEO. He served in the role for five years before stepping down as president and CEO in May 2011 and as chairman at the end of that year.

Since 2002, Henrikson and his wife, Mary, have pledged $2.5 million to support diversity scholarships and another $1 million to attract matching gifts to Emory Law’s annual fund.

“What I have learned over the years is how much diversity adds value in the business world,” Henrikson says. “With diversity, you bring different ideas to the table, different ways of doing things, and it brings a perspective that you may have been blind to before. It is common sense. If you have two talented teams— one where everyone looks and thinks alike and one where everyone is different—who is going to come up with the better solution?”

Although he never practiced law, Henrikson says his Emory law education was extremely valuable to his career. When he became a member of the Emory Board of Trustees, he decided he would establish an endowed diversity scholarship at Emory Law. “Emory, like all top universities, competes for the best students. Some of these students are discouraged from coming to Emory Law by cost. I felt that if individuals are talented and qualified and help create a diverse class, this scholarship could help them,” he says.

“The law school is free to use these funds without the definition of diversity being cubbyholed—geography, race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status—if a student is qualified, winter 2014

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Let the Record Show: Diversity Matters

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Maria Piva: “It is an increasingly borderless world, and I think that it is crucial to pursue any graduate degree in a diverse environment.”

he or she can benefit from this. I just want to feel like I am investing in something that is worthwhile and has a return on investment by helping young people become what they have the potential to be.”

While researching law schools, Kedar Bhatia 13L chose Emory because it offered strengths in the areas that interested him most.

“It came down to really great programs for what I wanted to do, great journals, and a very entrepreneurial environment. It turned out to be exactly right,” says Bhatia, who works in commercial litigation with Bracewell and Giuliani in New York.

Of particular interest to Bhatia was appellate litigation. When he discovered Emory did not have an appellate clinic, he worked on creating the Emory Law School Supreme Court Advocacy Project in his first year with the help of the late Professor David Bederman. Bederman, who served as the organization’s first adviser, was counsel of record in fifty-two cases in the United States Courts of Appeals, and he argued four cases before the US Supreme Court.

“The spirit of the school in trusting people with a plan to do what they wanted to do, under supervision, was a great experience. They made sure it was done right, and the administration was very helpful, but I feel like another school would have imposed a lot of barriers.

I am grateful for that because I am not sure it could have happened elsewhere,” Bhatia says, adding that the depth and breadth of experience and backgrounds—within the faculty and among his classmates—was valuable to his legal education.

“When I really got to know other students and work with them on a close basis, I realized how diverse the backgrounds were. I started law school at twenty-one, but we had many students who’d already had interesting careers before law school. It provided a lot of perspectives and exposed me to a lot of different leadership styles,” says Bhatia, a scholarship recipient who served as president of the South Asian Law Students Association and as editorin-chief of the student-run Emory International Law Review.

“Working with students with different personalities and backgrounds from different places is a lot like what you see when you are working at a large law firm in a large metropolitan area. At Emory Law I had classmates from all over the country and from other countries.

It was a microcosm of the world,” he says.

Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Maria Piva 14L moved to a diverse but heavily Hispanic community in Miami when she was four. She came to Emory with aspirations to return to her community after graduation to help new Americans navigate the legal system.

“It is very important to expose students to people from different backgrounds and cultures before they go out into the profession,” she says. “It is an increasingly borderless world, and I think that it is crucial to pursue any graduate degree in a diverse environment.”

Piva likened diversity in education to the importance of studying a culture before traveling and working abroad.

“You have to educate yourself and study the culture so that you will be able to conduct yourself properly in all situations. Those things

Cour te s y of E mory L aw

In 2002, a team of professors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro began a ten-year study of the influence of race on the quality of a legal education.

The unpublished report of those findings, Does Race Matter in Educational Diversity? A Legal and Empirical Analysis, says yes— it matters.

“The short answer is that extensive quantitative and qualitative empirical data support the finding that a racially diverse law student body provides educational benefits for students, for their institution, and for society, especially if there is significant interaction among students from diverse backgrounds,” reads the report.“We find that students differ in multiple ways upon enrollment in law school. Many of these differences are associated with diversities of backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, expectations, and outlooks that are related to their race. Many of the observed racial differences among students contribute to learning because differences foster richer interactions and positive educational outcomes that benefit students, institutions, and society.

We find that race contributes to the achievement of educational diversity. In addition, under conditions of significant law school racial diversity and high intergroup contact during law school, graduating law students perceived their law school as more open and respectful of diverse ideas.”

are an inherent part of being in a diverse culture,” she says. “For legitimate reasons, it is considered that the minority diversifies the class, but every person brings in his or her own perspective. In an environment like law school, which is about the exchange of ideas, that is really important.”

Piva works with the law school’s Office of Admission to help attract potential students to Emory Law. “There are many incentives that law schools Kioceaia Stenson: “At Emory I have had opportunities to offer—from waiving meet people who may not look like me, who think differapplication fees to ently, and who come from different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds.” offering financial aid packages—that much more than textbooks and case are essential in law. That guiding principle is what attracting the best students, especially considering how expensive law school made us want to give back to the institution that gave me such a wellcan get. If a school does not offer rounded education.” these, it can get stuck behind and risk Kessler and his wife, Rhonda, have having the community suffer from pledged $150,000 to the law school not having a broad and diverse class,” for diversity scholarships.

Piva says.

“It is hard enough for students David Kessler 94L was an to get into a great institution like accountant looking to get into tax law Emory. It is essential for them to have when he enrolled at Emory. “When I opportunities to continue their edugot to Emory, I got into some of the cation and become part of the most more litigation-centric and securities important conversations happening classes and I found that much more in society,” Kessler says. “To me, the exciting,” says Kessler, now a partner conversation is incomplete without a in Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, a diverse group of people answering the Pennsylvania firm that is one of the questions we face as a society. It can’t largest in the country specializing in all come from the same voice.” prosecuting securities fraud claims When she graduated from and consumer and investor protecSpelman College in 2011, Kioceaia tion litigation through class action.

Stenson 14L was accepted to ten “Emory was more of a practical law schools around the country. She experience than just textbooks and chose Emory for its sense of comcase law. By the time I graduated, I munity and the quality education had a better grasp of what it meant available from a nationally recognized to be a lawyer, what it meant to be university. In her third year at Emory accountable to people, and what it Law, Stenson is president of BLSA, meant to practice as an attorney,” a member of the Emory Law Mock he says. “Emory guided me to be Trial Society and the Emory Public conscious of rights and wrongs and Interest Committee, and a participant things going on in the world that in the Criminal Law and Civil Litigaimpact a broad group of people. It tion practice societies. has stayed with me that the law is so

Diversity Decisions During the lifetimes of current Emory law students, the US Supreme Court has decided several cases with implications for diversity in higher education.

In 1992, in United States v. Fordice, the Supreme Court ordered nineteen states to take immediate action to desegregate their public higher education systems.

Then, in 2003’s Gratz v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court outlawed the race-sensitive admission policy at the University of Michigan, which used a numerical formula that gave extra points to black applicants.

But in the companion case, Grutter v. Bollinger, the court upheld an affirmative action program at the ­University of Michigan Law School, confirming the 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v.

Bakke that race could still be considered in admission decisions as long as all other factors were equal.

In October 2012, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a lawsuit filed in 2008 against the university by a white applicant who alleged that the university’s consideration of race in admission violated the Equal Protection Clause. Last June, the court decided that the university did not prove that the means it chose to attain diversity in its enrollment were narrowly tailored to its goal.

She says diversity has been a natural facet of her Emory experience.

“I came into law school not wanting just to do well academically but also to make significant friendships and connections while I was here,” she says. “At Emory I have had opportunities to meet people who may not look like me, who think differently, and who come from different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. We have a multitude of organizations that reflect that diversity, but everyone works together.” winter 2014

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windows of opportunit y

If you’ve been touched by the stories in this issue of Emory Magazine, these windows can open up ways for you to turn your

inspiration into action. Here you’ll see how you can invest in the people, places, and programs found in these pages and beyond. Gifts to Emory produce powerful, lasting returns; they help create knowledge, advance research, strengthen communities, improve health, and much more.

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a lecture and a legacy Among the many ways Robert DeHaan enhanced the education of Rollins School of Public Health students and brought eminence to the school was by establishing the Virginia S. DeHaan Lecture on Health Promotion and Education. Named for his late wife, Virginia DeHaan 77MPH, the lecture series honors the memory of an outstanding public health faculty member. To support the series, contact Kathryn Graves at 404.727.3352 or kgraves@emory.edu.

give peace a chance To honor the work of Susan Henry-Crowe 76T and to help members of the Emory community engage with peace builders at home and abroad, you can support Journeys of Reconciliation, an interreligious program in the Office of the Dean of the Chapel and Religious Life. The Journeys program sponsors immersion experiences for Emory students, faculty, staff, and alumni. It’s another way Emory makes a meaningful mark on the world. To learn more about supporting Journeys, contact Lisa Garvin at 404.727.4070 or lisa.garvin@emory.edu.

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A recipient of the Emory Law Distinguished Alumni Award, Rob Henrikson 72L understands the value of bringing the best students from across the cultural spectrum to study at Emory University School of Law. To help make that happen, he and his wife, Mary Henrikson, established the C. Robert Henrikson Endowed Scholarship Fund in 2001. Since then, thirty students have graduated from the law school through hard work and with financial help from the Henriksons. For information on contributing to this or other scholarship funds in Emory Law, contact Joella Hricik at 404.727.9172 or joella.hricik@emory.edu

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a larger profit

Goizueta Business School students and alumni are effecting positive change in the world through programs like Social Enterprise @ Goizueta. A class gift in 2005 created Goizueta’s executive MBA endowed scholarship, which is awarded annually to an EMBA student who is self funded and comes from a not-for-profit background. Special consideration is given to candidates from underrepresented areas, including primary, middle, and secondary education administration; government; community service organizations; and entrepreneurs. To learn more or to contribute to the EMBA endowed scholarship fund, the BBA scholarship endowment, or the meritbased MBA scholarship fund, contact Jeff Colburn at 404.727.7573 or jeff.colburn@emory.edu.

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a w e a lt h o f k n o w l e d g e

The Emory Libraries are central to every Emory student’s academic life. Alumni and friends who want to support student work in the libraries can do so by creating fellowships. Alumnus Bill Newton 75C 76G and his wife, Anne Newton 76G, for example, fund an annual fellowship in the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. This year the Newton Fellowship is helping PhD candidate Asha French 16G finish her dissertation and build a portfolio of published work. To learn more, contact Alex Wan in the libraries development office at 404.727.5386 or alex.wan@emory.edu.

henr y- cr o we : em o r y ph o t o / vide o ; public health and henri k s o n : br yan melt z ; nicaragua : br yan clar k ; b o bb y j o nes : manuscript, archives , and rare b o o k librar y

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The Robert T. Jones Jr. Biomedical Engineering Fellowships endowment will provide support for students in Emory’s Laney Graduate School and the Georgia Institute of Technology pursuing doctorates in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. A unique academic partnership, the department offers two joint doctorates in biomedical engineering: one from Emory and Georgia Tech and the other from Emory, Georgia Tech, and Peking University in Beijing, China. Jones Fellows will be on the leading edge of discovery, and funding from the Jones Biomedical Engineering Fellows endowment will support their work. To learn more about supporting this innovative program, contact Katie Busch at 404.727.1521 or kbusch@emory.edu. winter 2014

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from the President

Impact and Excellence

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graduating seniors— that is, their knowing what the next chapter for them would be.

He reported that by June 1—three weeks after graduation—85 percent of our graduates knew that they would be following their preferred paths come September, whether that was Ja m e s Wag n e r , p r e s i d e n t, employment, graduemory univer sit y ate school, military or other public service, internships, or a planned “gap year.” Our graduates have little difficulty finding useful vocations.

They are helped in their search for vocation by programs like the next two that were reviewed. First up, the senior associate dean of Emory College, Michael Elliott, and the senior associate dean for campus life, Andy Wilson, reviewed the progress of the Academic Engagement Task Force. This task force has been working for more than a year to recommend ways to blur the distinctions between learning in the classroom and laboratory and learning in residential and extracurricular settings. In this manner we can leverage the advantages of each to greater heights. The educational experience at Emory must be powerful in its seamless continuity.

As if to punctuate this notion with an exclamation mark, we turned to the development of a distinctive program in ethics and athletics. Tim Downes, our athletics director, and Edward Queen, director of the servant leadership program in our ethics center, have undertaken what we believe is perhaps unique in higher education—the formalized introduction of ethical learning and reflection into athletics programs. In a day when moral lapses among coaches and players continue to bring headlines—reminding us that Emory’s earlier leaders harbored a wariness about intercollegiate sports—we might reassure our forebears that here, again, Emory is trying to chart a different path.

All of this reminds me of the often-quoted words of former Emory president Atticus Haygood: “Let us stand by what is good,” he said, “and make it better if we can.”

There is much at Emory that is good indeed, and our faculty, students, staff, and alumni are doing wonderful things to make it all still better.

E MORY PHOTO VIDEO

Once every semester, the Administrative Council of Emory gathers for a two-hour confab to share with each other some of what is going on in their various corners and byways of the campus. This council comprises the deans, vice presidents, and heads of divisions like the libraries, the museum, and the ethics center—about eighty senior university leaders in all. The university is a big and complex place, and it is easy to lose sight of each other. These meetings give us a chance to gain the broadest possible perspective of what matters at Emory, what challenges and opportunities confront us, and what we are doing to meet them.

Last fall—as is often the case—I found myself both stunned and humbled by the conversation.

As we looked to the academic year ahead, I tried to outline six priorities that I thought should be on our minds and on our plates as administrators: student quality, faculty quality, programmatic and financial strength, reputation and public awareness of our strengths, operational effectiveness, and the distinctive excellence of Emory’s institutional character and culture.

Responding to this outline, one of my colleagues asked the legitimate and sincere question: What makes this list any different from the priorities being pursued by a host of other research universities similar to Emory?

In a sense, the answer is—“nothing.” Every research university should be focusing on these priorities.

What makes Emory distinctive, I believe, is the way we are filling out the list. Quality is in the details. What we heard during the rest of the agenda at that meeting suggests the Emory difference.

Some of our colleagues led us in conversation about the liberal arts at Emory, the strength of our students’ vocations, the ethos of our programs, and the intention of our trustees and friends to make all of these things accessible through a powerful scholarship endowment program. What we heard should give us all reason to be confident in the distinctive contribution Emory is seeking to make.

In the first presentation, psychology professor Robyn Fivush, chair of the newly recharged Commission on the Liberal Arts, reviewed the importance of the arts and sciences to society and the role of these disciplines in shaping and influencing nearly all of what we do at Emory, including in our professional schools.

Next up, Charlie Harman, our new vice president for government affairs, described the challenges in Washington and his hope that a sense of common good might direct the creative thinking and collaborative problem solving of our national leaders. It sounded like a call for people who can explore new directions with the precision and innovation of a scientist while applying the judgment and values of a humanist.

To underscore the value of Emory graduates to society, Paul Fowler, the director of our career planning office, reviewed the statistics for postgraduate “resolution” of our

OXFORD { OUTLOOK winter 2014

Library Brings a New Vision of Learning A

s you walk in the front doors of Oxford’s new Library and Academic Commons, the first thing you notice is the view—from the front straight through the back of the building and out huge floor-toceiling windows on each side.

That view—bold, expansive, and bright—represents the shared vision that made the building a reality. And even though it was fifteen years in the making, the library is the result of fortunate timing, giving Oxford a resource designed for today and years to come.

Associate Dean and College Librarian Kitty McNeill 85G and a team of visionaries including Dean Stephen Bowen; Fund-Raising Committee Chair Hugh Tarbutton Jr. 84OX; and dedicated alumni, faculty, and students brought the project to fruiEven though it was fifteen tion. “The fifteen years was a benefit,” says years in the making, McNeill. “It allowed us to make choices the library is the result that we would not have made earlier, of fortunate timing, incorporating changes in technology giving Oxford a resource and in the ways students learn.” designed for today and The students of 2013, in contrast to years to come. those of the 1990s when the library was

in its early planning, are wired, collaborative learners who need flexible learning spaces with room to spread out and plug in.

Technology also changed. Books aren’t the only focus; libraries now offer computers, wireless access, and technology-rich learning spaces. Digital offerings have vastly expanded, moving journals, books, and resources online, and reducing the need for shelves.

The new library efficiently accommodates today’s students and technology. The project renovated the old library and added a 10,000-square-foot front addition. An academic commons resides in this new section and is an open space for individual and collaborative learning. iMacs are lined up on long tables. Comfortable chairs are arranged in groups throughout the floor, as well as in nooks for studying. There are two research consultation rooms and an adjoining patio for group learning. Wireless Internet is available throughout.

Also on the first floor, visitors can find a special collections room, a living-room-style reading area, a cafe and vending space, an exhibit gallery, and a catering kitchen for events. continued on page 50 winter 2014

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{

Dean ’s message Dear Alumni and Friends of Oxford:

As we near the accomplishment of one critical goal, we are preparing to pursue a second goal that is equally vital to the future of Oxford College. In this and other publications, we have written about the dramatic changes to our campus facilities during the past few years. The restorations of Seney Hall; Phi Gamma; Williams Hall; and Language Hall; our spectacular new library; the construction now well underway of our newest student-residence, Fleming Hall; and the start of construction of our new science building in May 2014 are indications that we are on course to creating a campus that extends the legacy of Oxford College well into the twenty-first century. These facilities allow us to attract both faculty and students who understand Oxford’s emphasis on supportive community and faculty-student collaboration.

The next goal we need to tackle is equally vital to the future of the college: building our endowment for student scholarships.

Colleges rely on this resource to fund the financial aid necessary to enroll a student body that is consistent with their educational ideals. Many of our peer colleges have endowments in excess of $250,000 per student. At Oxford, the endowment is $40,000 per student. We continue to provide financial aid to attract students who are a good fit with Oxford College, but in the absence of a robust endowment, much of that financial aid must be paid out of our current-year operating budget. This starves academic and campus life programs of funds that would support their growth and improvement.

But Oxford loves a challenge. You will be hearing more in the next few months about our specific endowment targets and how we hope to reach them. I hope you will join me in focusing on this goal. Thank you for all the ways you support Oxford College.

Sincerely,

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Gregory-Rackley Award Benefits Nisbet’s Unique Research Delia Nisbet 92PhD, associate professor of German, joined the Oxford College faculty in 1982, building the current programs in both German and Italian. A scholar of German and Italian literature as well as comparative literature, she presents frequently at international conferences, often lecturing on the German poet Heinrich Heine, who was a subject of her 2000 book, Heinrich Heine and Giacomo Leopardi: The Rhetoric of Midrash.

Nisbet is the recipient of the GregoryRackley Faculty Career Development Award, which has helped to fund her current research project on the German Jewish press prior to and during World War II. How did you arrive at the subject of your research?

In 2007 I was invited to give a presentation at a conference in Krakow, Poland, on the experience of Italian women during the Holocaust.

In my research to prepare for the conference, I discovered that many Italian Jewish and non-Jewish women were sent to Ravensbrück, an extermination camp for women about

100 kilometers north of Berlin. I interviewed some of the survivors, and I also became connected to Dr. Monika Herzog, who is a curator and historian of the Ravensbrück experience.

Through her I was able to see artifacts of items that victims made while in prison.

The GregoryR ackle y facult y career Development Award Eugene Rackley III 55OX 58B says that he was moved to establish the Gregory-Rackley Faculty Career Development Award in 2002 in part because, “Oxford is more than its buildings. It is its teachers. Oxford teachers teach.”

Thanks to the generosity of the Gregory-Rackley award, a dozen Oxford faculty members have been able to take their scholarly interests in directions that would be difficult without the assistance of the grant.

Rackley named the grant to honor John Gregory Sr., whom he credits with helping him succeed at Oxford.

Nelson, second from right in front row, poses with sophomore leaders selected to mentor freshmen who will take part in Leadership Oxford this spring.

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As I researched further I remembered a quotation from Heine, and it is one that I have carried with me throughout this research. Heine implies that we must have an historical understanding of where we come from in order to know who we are, and we must know who we are in order to form a realistic vision of our future. With this as my guide, I began to ask how this happened and how the Jewish communities survived.

Where did you go from there in your research?

I received the Gregory-Rackley Faculty Career Development Award in 2012, and this allowed me to visit the Judaica collection at the University of Cologne. I wanted to see how the progressive German constitution of the Weimar Republic could have been circumvented to allow the policies of the Nazi regime.

The passing of the Enabling Act of 1933 by the members of the Reichstag, including members of the Ministry of Justice, allowed Hitler to establish a dictatorship. That was how the genocidal policies became “legal.” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor of the Nürnberg war trials, said of it,“The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.”

Back in the US, I began research on the life of the German Jewish communities from 1933 to 1944. I kept coming across references to German Jewish newspapers, but I could not find the newspapers themselves—they were not at the National Archives in Washington or even at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem.

I knew that reading these “exile presses,” as they were called, would give a sense of the life of the communities. I found out that a large collection is contained in the German National Library in Frankfurt. Researchers must apply to see these materials, which also include letters, and they are available only by visiting in person. This past summer I spent a month in Frankfurt, working all day each day, poring over these sources.

What is your next step?

I am going over the reams of material I now have. My ultimate goal is a book manuscript, which I hope to have ready by 2015.

I am grateful for the Gregory-Rackley award and a grant from the Oxford Faculty Development Committee for making my research travel possible.

}

John W. Gregory Sr .

1915 –2013

The Gregory-Rackley Faculty Career Development Award is named in honor of John W. Gregory Sr., professor of humanities emeritus, who served Oxford College from 1949 to 1979. The John and Sara Gregory Scholarship Endowment is named for him and his wife, Sara, who served for many years as Oxford librarian. More information on Gregory, who died in October 2013, is found in an obituary published in the Emory Alumni Association’s blog. Visit http://thepost.emory.edu/2013/10/08/in-memoriam/.

Alumni Profile: Julie Nelson A Be autiful Bal ance

Julie Nelson 95OX 96C travels the globe in her role as southeastern regional wine and beer manager for World Market. However, even if she’s in Europe or Australia negotiating a major purchase, she never strays far from lessons she learned at Oxford College. Nelson’s connection to Oxford is as vital today as it was during her college years. This is her twenty-first year working with Leadership Oxford (LO), a group that prepares freshmen for leadership roles in their sophomore year, and her sixth year on the Alumni Board. “I stay involved because Oxford gave so much to me. It’s the place where I became who I am.”

For Nelson, Oxford was a transformative college experience for many reasons. She especially enjoyed faculty-student interactions. “Professors were fully involved with research, but were also interested in and involved with students. That’s a beautiful balance.” She feels Oxford’s two-year structure exposes students to leadership opportunities early in their college careers.

“That allows for remarkable student development and makes Oxford unique.”

Leadership Oxford and its founder, retired Chaplain Sammy Clark, were among Nelson’s strongest influences. “Sammy is a brilliant minister with an unquenchable love for learning and a passion for social justice.

He also happens to be very funny. That refreshing take on authority is compelling for students.”

As a student, Nelson developed a better understanding of herself through LO. As an adult leader, the group still enriches her life.“The students inspire me. It’s thrilling to watch introverted students blossom.”

LO also informs her career. “When I started my job, my coworkers and I lacked unity.” Nelson implemented LO values, playing up coworkers’ strengths and encouraging group effectiveness. “We now function as a team, even though we work hundreds of miles apart.”

The dual English/history major never imagined she would end up in the business world, but her liberal arts degree proved advantageous.

“It fosters curiosity. My job came about because I was curious, enthusiastic, and had the skills to synthesize information and communicate.

Those things are critical in a business conversation.”

Despite a busy professional life, Nelson remains connected with Oxford, a place that inspires her to maintain her own “beautiful balance” between career and social service.—Nancy Moreland

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The Library New Vision continued Upstairs, a variety of seating—complete with built-in outlets—overlooks the academic commons. Also there are two large technologyenriched classrooms, five tutor-support rooms, and four group-study rooms with large-screen displays and laptop connections. The study rooms include tables with whiteboard surfaces, so paperless students can write out problems on the spot.

The print collection of more than 89,000 volumes is housed in compact shelving, which can contract or expand for browsing. “Because of the compact shelving,” says McNeill, “we’re able to gain back study and classroom spaces.”

In addition to the computers stationed throughout, MacBook Pro laptops and iPads can be checked out at the front desk, as can more than 1,300 DVDs, best sellers, e-books, and cameras, video equipment, and digital recorders. Users can access the entire Emory University library collection as well as online databases, journals, and other digital resources through the library’s website.

The style is contemporary Oxford. The thirty-foot ceiling above the academic commons features Georgia wood, and the entrance flooring and grand stairs are Lithonia granite, the same used in some The students of 2013 . . . are wired, collaborative learners who need flexible learning spaces with room to spread out and plug in.

of the oldest buildings on campus. The colors, furniture, and lighting are quirky and modern, chosen with student input. Outside, the library coexists visually with its older neighbors, Phi Gamma Hall and the Oxford Chapel. It’s closer to the Quad now and fits in so well that it takes you a minute to realize that its classic lines comprise new windows and green construction.

When Tarbutton first entered the new building, he reflected on those who influenced the project. “I was thinking about

Mrs. Elizer and Mrs. Gregory and wondering if we had built something they would have been proud of,” he said. “I also thought about how hard the committee had worked, and the wonderful guidance and encouragement I had gotten during my short time on the project from people like Kitty, Pierce Cline 47OX, Joe Edwards 54OX 56B 58MBA, Judy Greer, and Bob Chappell 56OX 58B 68MBA, just to name a few.”

And what do students think? McNeill says see for yourself—particularly at 10:30 at night. “The students are using every nook and cranny.”

According to Katherine Couch 14OX, “This new library is a place that students want to make a central part of their day. It gives us not only the technology and research materials we need, it gives us useful spaces for classrooms and collaboration. . . . And it gives us restful spaces for quiet, personal reflection.”

The next time you’re walking through the Oxford Quad, step inside and enjoy the view.—Jane Howell

Brief News

C alendar

Linda Isako Angst (right) joined Oxford in the fall semester as the new associate dean for academic affairs. She comes to Oxford from Lewis and Clark College, where she had a joint teaching appointment with the Department of Sociology/Anthropology and Department of Gender Studies.

Golden Eagles Reunion, April 26

Rod Stubbs, head men’s basketball coach since 2005, is the new Oxford College athletic director.

Two existing buildings in the East Village residential complex, formerly called Alpha and Beta, have been officially named Elizer Hall and Murdy Hall. The names 50

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Alumni Reunion Weekend, April 25–27

Dooley’s Dolls Reunion, April 26 Oxford Commencement/ Class of 1964 Reunion, May 10

honor Marshall Elizer, longtime administrator at Oxford who died in 2009, and William Murdy, who served as dean from 1987 to 1999. A third building in the complex, Fleming Hall, is under construction and headed for completion by mid-2014.

It is named for Bond Fleming, who served as dean from 1966 to 1976.

}

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Emory Cares 2013 Students spruce up DeKalb County’s Sagamore Hills Elementary, which recently received a grant to create an outdoor classroom, during Emory Cares International Service Day in November. Photo by Alfred C. Austin IV.

54 EAA Leadership 56 Emory Medalists 60 Alumni Ink winter 2014

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from the ea a

Emory Everywhere Hanging out with Dooley was all in a day’s back-to-class work for Charles Messing 90B (right, on left) and prospective Emory student, his son Joshua. The Messings were attendees at the October Back to Class: Washington, D.C. The program was emceed by Joan Goldfrank 73C 76L and featured Emory scholarship student Jessica Simon 15B with university leaders Ajay Nair, James Curran, Robin Forman, Cathryn Johnson, and Andrea Hershatter.

At Jake’s Halloween Open House held annually at the Miller-Ward Alumni House, twins Morgan and Mitchell Kyles, son and daughter of Jennifer CrabbKyles 98OX 00C pause for a moment to enjoy a pumpkin-side photo op with Swoop.

David Hanson 05B (above, right) and Phil Hills were married at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., on September 14. Hanson writes, “We had several Emory folks at the wedding including Scott Allen, Julie Barefoot, Terry Bozeman, Ken Lee 05B, Brian Rutter 05B, Mike Mandl, Steve Sencer, Tom Lawley, Matt Englehart, Andy Wilson, Ann Stainback, Chad Ittner 05B, Edie Murphree, Ron Sauder, Belva White 08B, and Michelle Stevens 14B. It was a great Emory reunion.”

This Thanksgiving, Emory trustees, alumni, faculty, staff, and friends hosted forty-two international students at eighteen dinners to celebrate the holiday with American traditions.

Faye Zheng 11OX 14B (right, from left), Xiaso Tang 16C, and Lyon (Xiaozhe) Li attended the dinner at the home of Emory staff member Karen Salisbury and Roger Palys.

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Dear Friends, As we enter the new year, we are once again excited by the prospect of what’s yet to come. We take stock of our accomplishments, evaluate our progress, and establish vigorous goals to support our alumni.

After sixteen years of working with Emory’s alumni, I have been blessed to witness our organization strategically grow and evolve year after year. From our humble roots, our Emory Alumni Association staff has doubled in size.

We have grown into a supportive team that cultivates strong communication and outstanding alumni career services. By working with our dedicated volunteer leaders, we are proud to integrate your feedback and wish lists into hundreds of programs each year around the world.

I am continually inspired by all of you and your amazing talents, and I am so very proud of what you have built in your association.

These past years, it has been my privilege to serve as your association leader. As I move into my new role as vice president and secretary of the university, I will continue to appreciate and respect the multitude of ways in which you give back to our university each and every day.

Our alumni will always be near to my heart, and I look forward to working closely with the association in the years to come. Thank you, my friends.

Please join me in welcoming my colleague Sarah Cook 95C to lead you in defining the vibrant future for your Emory Alumni Association. Your association is in excellent hands under Sarah’s leadership.

Happy New Year!

alli s o n d y k e s v ice p r e s i d e n t a n d s ec r e ta r y o f t h e u n i v e r s i t y

Upcoming Alumni Events South Florida, February 18–19: Emory in Your City featuring President James Wagner Atlanta, February 26: International Careers Networking Night Hong Kong, March 13: Emory in Your City featuring Emory Trustee John Rice, Vice Chairman of GE and President and CEO of GE Global Growth and Operations

dyke s: tom brodna x 65ox 68c

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Sing to the tune of the Brady Bunch theme song.

Here’s the story of Emory Alumni.

We are 51 amazing chapters strong!

121,000 worldwide members.

Join us! You can’t go wrong.

Stay connected to the Emory family through interest groups, global events, and social media.

alumni.emory.edu

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Sarah Cook Succeeds Allison Dykes as Head of Alumni Relations Efforts Allison Dykes, formerly vice president in 2001 directing student and young alumni development at Emory, then managed the areas for alumni relations, has been named vice of career services, regional chapter and interest president and secretary of the university. Stepgroups, and business relationships. She received ping into her alumni leadership role is Sarah the DAR Spirit of Emory Award in 2010. She has Cook 95C, who was appointed senior associate vice president for the Emory Alumni Association (EAA) in November.

“Sarah has played a critical role in the transformation of the Emory Alumni Association through her analytical thinking, insight, and a commitment to upholding Emory’s brand,” says Susan Cruse, senior vice president for development and alumni relations. “I’m delighted to have her M i ss i o n a c c e p t e d : Together, Allison Dykes (left) and Sarah Cook represent three decades of service to Emory; they will continue in new roles. as part of the DAR leadership team.” served as a leader on many projects and comSince 2007, Cook has served as senior mittees for the division and Emory, including director for Initiatives and Technology for the the Emory Magazine Editorial Advisory Board, association, responsible for strategic planning, the Traditions and History at Emory Commitbudget management, marketing, and technoltee, the Center for Women Advisory Board, the ogy. Under her leadership, the association pubInformation Technology Steering Committee, lished The Emory Memory: Traditions, Legacy the Emory Senate Committee on the Environ& Lore, now in its third printing; crafted its three-year strategic plan; created a new graphic ment, Friends of Emory Forest, the Blue and Gold Make Green Alumni Group, and the identity represented by the “I’m In” campaign; Brand Advisory Council. and expanded alumni access to resources, Prior to joining Emory, Cook worked for including the Miller-Ward Alumni House, a national environmental organization as Emory libraries and online services, and the the community organizer for Louisiana and Princeton Club of New York.

Alabama assisting local communities with Cook began her tenure with the association

media relations and campaign planning on issues such as wetlands and forest protection, environmental justice, sustainable development, and mercury pollution.

As vice president and secretary of the university, Dykes will be responsible for working with President James Wagner and the cabinet in promoting effective governance of the university’s Board of Trustees and fostering collaboration among members of the university and the board.

“In her alumni role, Allison has worked with the Office of the Secretary in creating important partnerships and collaborations to support the development of volunteer leadership at Emory,” says Wagner. “Her sixteen years of experience in leadership development and her success in development and alumni relations will serve the board well.”

Dykes joined the university in 1997 as director of regional programs, developing and managing a university-wide alumni volunteer leadership program in major US cities. From 1999 to 2002, she was the association’s interim and then executive director for programming and operations, planning and managing the completion and all policy development associated with Emory’s Miller-Ward Alumni House, which opened in 2000. She received the Emory University Award of Distinction in 2012.

Dykes also initiated and managed a process for strategic planning for programming and volunteer leadership development still used by the EAA. She was named associate vice president in 2002 and then vice president in 2006.

Under her leadership, the association has redefined its role and mission to focus on leadership development and volunteer management for Emory’s approximately 120,000 alumni.

The EAA is recognized for its work defining and measuring alumni engagement.

Dykes succeeds Rosemary Magee 82PhD, who was appointed director of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library in 2012.

Video: Meet Sarah Craven Cook 95C, SAVP of the Emory Alumni Association

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dy ke s: ann borden; cook: Chris Cook

E A A L eadership T ransition

register Your Key to Class Notes AH: Allied Health B: Goizueta Business School (undergraduate) C: Emory College of Arts and Sciences D: School of Dentistry G: James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies H: Honorary degree L: School of Law M: School of Medicine MBA: Goizueta Business School (graduate) MN: School of Nursing (graduate) MR: Medical resident N: Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing OX: Oxford College PH: Rollins School of Public Health PhD: All doctor of philosophy degrees T: Candler School of Theology

tom brodna x 65ox 68c

Emory Alumni Board: New Members The Emory Alumni Board welcomes Deena ­Gilland 07N (right, from left), Sandra Stone 93G, Lynn Ward 94B, Mark Kasman 84C, Scott Berger 83C, Chris Young 93T, and Cassie Young 07C; not pictured: Sara ­Nicholson 04B. The advisory board meets four times a year and consists of alumni representing all of the schools and units, interest groups, and regions that make up Emory’s alumni population of more than 115,000. Board committees include development, initiatives, marketing, nominating and leadership, and student-to-alumni experience. To learn more, visit www.alumni.emory.edu.

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Emory Medalists 2013

S o n n y De r i s o a n d J oa n H o u s to n Hall

Though their professions are markedly different, 2013 Emory Medalists ­Walter M. “Sonny” Deriso Jr. 68C 72L and Joan Houston Hall 71G 76PhD share a commitment to cultivating a legacy that will endure.

A longtime Georgia business leader, Deriso served as chair of Campaign Emory, the successful $1.6 billion comprehensive campaign that concluded in 2012. For Hall, the love of words and cultural history fueled her pursuit of a scholarly achievement that took fifty years to complete: The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) documents the subtlety of American expression for future generations.

Deriso and Hall accepted the university’s highest alumni honor at the annual Emory Medal Ceremony in November. “Joan, thank you for your leadership and your steadfast commitment to scholarly works and research that further our understanding of language,” said President James Wagner. “And Sonny, we thank you for the financial and intellectual guidance you have given to this community and for shaping Emory’s future. It is an honor to present you both with the 2013 Emory Medal.”

As a history major in Emory College, Deriso was the first president of the Student Government Association, and was elected to both Omicron Delta Kappa and the D.V. S. Senior Honor Society. At graduation he received the Marion Luther Brittain Service Award. As a student at Emory Law, he served as student writing editor of the Journal of Public Law, and received his juris doctorate with distinction upon graduation.

Deriso was elected in 2002 as an alumni trustee to the Emory Board of Trustees and now serves as a term trustee. He serves as chair of the advisory board of the Center for Ethics at Emory. Since 2003 he also has served on the Candler Committee of 100. As chair of Campaign Emory, Deriso led the university to exceed a campaign goal of $1.6 billion.

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Deriso was a practicing attorney in Albany, Georgia, from 1972 to 1991. In 1991 he became president of Security Bank and Trust Company of Albany, a Synovus bank; and in 1997 he was elected vice chairman of the board of Synovus Financial Corp., a role in which he served until 2005, when he retired from Synovus. In 2006 he became founding chair of Atlantic Capital Bancshares and led the bank holding company in raising more than $125 million in capital.

He now serves as chair of the board of Atlantic Capital Bancshares and Atlantic Capital Bank.

He also serves as chair of the board of Georgia Regional Transportation Authority; is a member of the board of directors of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce; is a member of the Rotary Club of Atlanta (where he received the Ivan Allen Club Service Award); and is chair of the board of the Foundation of the Methodist Home for Children and Youth of the South Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church.

“Emory has enabled me to do so much of what I do and has been a big part of who I am,” Deriso says. He and his wife, Judy, have three sons. “At one time I was practicing law, coaching baseball, serving on three boards, building a house at the same time. Those were some of the best years of our lives. It wasn’t that I spent every moment with my family, but the things we did were quality things. Our children are a message to the future that we’ll never see, so we have to make sure we deliver that message correctly.”

As chief editor of DARE and a distinguished scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hall has managed federal and private grants of more than $11 million for what has

been called “one of the most significant humanities projects in the United States.” The project’s patrons include the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the New York Times Company Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and many other foundations as well as hundreds of individuals across the nation. The new digital edition (Harvard University Press, 2013) will allow readers to look up the meanings of local American words and phrases from Adam’s housecat to zydeco.

Hall has served as president of the American Dialect Society and the Dictionary Society of North America. She has been designated a fellow of the Dictionary Society of North America, and she was recently granted an honorary doctorate of humane letters by her undergraduate school, the College of Idaho.

She serves as distinguished scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she has received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research. As well as publishing widely, she is a frequent lecturer and a guest on radio programs across the country.

DARE has been called “the greatest achievement in American lexicography in the past fifty years,” according to the Journal of American Speech. In her nominations, Hall was hailed as a prototype for the American “public intellectual,” and has been lauded for making her scholarship readily accessible to the public via widely acclaimed printed volumes and a userfriendly website.

Since childhood, Hall has been fascinated by the unique characteristics of regional language. Her love of linguistics grew while she attended Emory to study English and conducted fieldwork to capture regional dialects in rural Georgia. “It changed my life,” she recalls.

Though the DARE volumes A to Z may be published, the work is never done. “Language changes,” Hall explains. “What we tried to do in the original fieldwork was to record and preserve things that were going out of the language.” Hall’s leadership of DARE has been internationally lauded as an extraordinary contribution to cultural understanding.—Michelle Valigursky

ann borden

l e ga c y mak e r s : 2013 Emory Medalists Sonny Deriso and Joan Houston Hall at the November ceremony.

PROMISE TO PLAY

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#PlayEmory Play Emory strives to instill the Emory Community with a passion for physical activity and a healthy lifestyle from the moment an individual arrives on campus. The goals of the program align with Emory University’s Vision and Mission as well as the Division of Campus Life and Athletics & Recreation: • Produce an education process through for-credit classes and non-credit programming that contributes to a broad definition of health and wellness across Healthy Emory • Lend students the opportunity to learn and explain how to engage in their campus community through initiating and advancing meaningful health and wellness activities themselves • Affect lifelong change for the student body and community members through experiential-based teaching and learning approaches in health and wellness • Yield research and education on Health and Wellness through Physical Activity’s impact on student development, student engagement, and student success.

www.play.emory.edu magazine 57 winter 2014

register wor k in g it: ox f o r d

w o r k ing it: grad uate

working it: nu rsing

When Barry Jones 61OX 63C came to Oxford, his world changed forever.

“The opportunity for a classical education was the road less taken, and it made all the difference,” he says.

With a degree in humanities, he began a career in advertising and later wrote and produced films for PBS. In 1990 he and wife, Paula, began a venture in furniture design, opening the Summer House in Highlands, N.C. Clients include George Lucas, Robert Redford, Hyatt Hotels, and noted architects and designers. Says Jones, “Our success has always been predicated on ‘leap and the net will appear.’ Oxford was that first leap.”

Nicholas A. Zachariades 91PhD is an attorney who practices in the area of intellectual property law with a focus on patent opinion counseling and patent procurement for clients in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

He has extensive experience in counseling clients in the areas of biotechnology, immunology, small molecules, molecular biology, virology, vaccines, and oncology. Zachariades studied microbiology and immunology at Emory’s Laney Graduate School.

Crystal Bailey 06N 07MN arrived in Lilongwe, Malawi, last summer to serve with the Global Health Service Partnership, a new collaboration of SEED Global Health and the Peace Corps. Bailey teaches midwifery at Kamuzu College of Nursing, which trains up to 200 nurse midwives a year. “My heart is for the individual women’s experiences, and yet my goal here is for the safe training of the masses of midwives,” Bailey writes in her blog. “Malawi is focusing hard on safe motherhood and making gains. For every discouraging thing I see, I also see something encouraging.”

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

wor k in g it: c o l l e g e

w o r k ing it: law

working it: pu blic healt h

Soon after graduating with a political science degree, Tash Elwyn 93C began his career at Raymond James as a financial adviser trainee.

After building a successful practice, he gained increasing management responsibility and, in January 2012, was named president of Raymond James and Associates’ Private Client Group, overseeing some 1,300 financial advisers affiliated with the St. Petersburg–based firm.

When the company acquired brokerage firm Morgan Keegan, Elwyn’s responsibilities doubled.

Married with two children, he is an active volunteer and Emory supporter.

Audrey Biggerstaff 13L recently joined the pro bono practice of Atlanta law firm Hunton and Williams. A 2013 graduate of Emory’s School of Law and a member of Emory’s Child Rights Project, Biggerstaff held internships with the Office of the Public Defender for the Atlanta Judicial Circuit Juvenile Division and the Fulton County Office of the Child Attorney. She earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Southern California.

With the leadership of Chad VanDenBerg 96MPH, Grady Hospital has improved some important metrics. As vice president of quality and performance improvement, he worked with the hospital’s physicians, nurses, and administrators to reduce centralline-associated blood stream infections by 39 percent in 2012 and catheter-associated urinary tract infections by 26 percent. “Administration was the right blend of business and health care,” says VanDenBerg, who joined Grady in 1997. “It gave me a view into potentially impacting hundreds, if not thousands, of lives all at one time.”

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

wor k in g it: b u s i ne ss

w o r k ing it: me d ic ine

working it: the olo gy

Rhonda Fischer 13MBA has replaced Daniel Shoy Jr. 95C as the new chief operating officer for the East Lake Foundation of Atlanta. In this role, she will be responsible for the foundation’s operations, administration, finances, and programmatic partnerships.

Shoy assumes the role of president, responsible for strategic goal-setting focused on advancing the organization’s mission and will have overall responsibility for the foundation’s operations, programs, partnerships, fund-raising, and external relations. Prior to joining the foundation in 2010, Shoy worked at the Arthur M. Blank Foundation.

Jason Baker 98C 02M found out he had type 1 diabetes in medical school, and subsequently became an endocrinologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

On a medical mission to Uganda, he met Marjorie, an outspoken advocate for diabetes patients in developing countries with little access to supplies such as needles and insulin. She died at twenty-nine waiting for a kidney transplant, leading Baker to found Marjorie’s Fund in 2011 to help patients like her. Today the organization runs outreach programs in India, Rwanda, and Uganda, and supports an endocrinology fellowship in Ethiopia.

The Rev. George Grant 85T was recently named the executive director for pastoral services for Emory Healthcare. Since 2007, Grant has served as the director of research and innovation at the Emory Center for Pastoral Services, conducting empirical spiritual health research across Emory Healthcare and all health science academic divisions. He holds faculty appointments in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Candler School of Theology, and the Department of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

Share your career news and updates with E-Class Notes. Visit www.alumni.emory.edu/updateinfo.

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2 0 1 4 JOURNEYS OF DISCOVERY National Parks and Lodges of the Old West May 24–June 2, 2014 From $3,695, plus air Orbridge

A C I T C R A T AN

Flavors of Provence June 7–15, 2014 From $3,995,plus air Orbridge Jewels of Antiquity: Rome to Venice June 12–27, 2014 From $4,995, plus air Alumni Holidays International European Mosaic June 16–24, 2014 From $2,499, airfare included Oceania Cruises & Go Next Baltic Treasures June 20–July 1, 2014 From $3,999, airfare included Oceania Cruises & Go Next Normandy, 70th Anniversary July 22–30, 2014 From $2,795, plus air Alumni Holidays International India: The Tibetan Cultural Experience June 28– July 13, 2014 From $6,795 (plus air) Classic Escapes Alaskan Frontiers July 31–August 10, 2014 From $2,999, airfare included Oceania Cruises & Go Next

s from GreetingD ubai

Provence Greet

inGs f rom

Where would you like to visit?

Emory alumni travel the world. Immerse yourself in exotic locales and engage in cultural experiences you’ll never forget.

From National Park exploration to Italian culinary education to the Tibetan cultural experience, Emory Travel Program trips offer a world of discovery.

Join us this year to visit your dream destination with Emory friends and family.

alumnitravel@emory.edu • 404.727.7150

The information and dates above are based on information provided by our travel vendors as of December 2013 and are subject to change. Individual trip brochures will be available to be mailed out approximately 9–12 months prior to the trip’s departure. All Emory Travel Program tours require that participants be in good physical condition. Each traveler must be capable, without assistance, of walking a minimum of one mile over uneven terrain and of climbing stairs that may not have handrails. Participants should have sufficient stamina to keep pace with an active group of travelers on long days of touring. If you have any questions about your ability to participate in a tour, please call the Emory Travel Program at 404.727.7150.

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Alumni ink s u p p o r t g r o u p : In Reawakening Rebekah: The Gift of the CLAMOR Girls (2013), Deidre Ann ­deLaughter 80C introduces a woman whose successful, satisfying life has suddenly unraveled, giving way to depression and painful, but necessary, self-exploration through therapy and group support. DeLaughter, an Atlanta native, now lives in Athens and is the director of Learning Support at the University of North Georgia.

This Will Have You in Stitches Teen fiction seems to be trending toward ever-darker themes these days—think The Hunger Games and the Divergent series—and Henry Franks (2012), the debut novel of Peter Adam Salomon 89C, easily finds its place on that shelf. When we meet the book’s sixteenyear-old title character, he is recovering from a horrifying accident that ravaged his body, destroyed his memory, and killed his mother. All but ignored by his distant father, Henry is tormented by nightmares and loneliness. Meanwhile, a murder mystery is unfolding in his small Georgia town. Described on Amazon as “a dark, psychological thriller about a boy’s search for himself,” Henry Franks is a Frankenstein homage that Booklist called “the thinking teen’s horror choice of the year.” l aw s c h o o l l i f e : Set against the backdrop of a Southern university, Things Are Going to Slide (2012) by Rangeley Wallace 72C follows a law professor through a difficult period in her life: her husband has left her, pregnant with their second child; she loses a coveted academic position to an old boyfriend; and her law clinic is challenged by a difficult, and potentially devastating, case. Wallace’s second novel, available in digital editions, blends romance with university politics and legal suspense. Her first novel, No Defense, was published in 1997.

wor k in g it: h ea lt h In a life-changing journey of healing, Patty McDuffey 99OX 01C shared her professional expertise with the Acupuncture Relief Project in the remote regions of Kogate and Bhimphedi, Nepal. At these rustic facilities, the healers wear many hats and tend to patient care. McDuffey is also the owner of Mt. Bachelor Acupuncture and Herbal Clinic in Bend, Oregon. She is a licensed acupuncturist and certified Chinese herbalist.

wor k in g it: o n t h e r a d i o Digital relationships and online dating are hot topics on “Hook Up with Dr. Jess,” a radio talk show produced by sociologist and UCLA PhD candidate Jess Carbino 07C. Carbino will share sex, dating, and relationship research and advice in a new book for dating women in their twenties. You can follow Dr. Jess on Twitter @jessicacarbino.

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g r o u p d y n a m i c : Timothy Kelly 84C, a professor of social work at the University of Dundee, shares his expertise in group dynamics in A-Z of Groups and Groupwork (2013), coauthored with Mark Doel. The book is a useful guide for those interested in working in mental health, adult or children’s services, health, social work, community work, or youth work roles.

Jonathan Schanzer 94C, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explores a new side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his third book, State of Failure: Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Unmaking of the Palestinian State (2013). An expert on the Middle East, Schanzer suggests that the reasons for Palestine’s stalled progress toward independence are more complex than Israeli interests. Schanzer previously worked at the Department of the Treasury, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Jewish Policy Center, and the Middle East Forum; he has testified before Congress and appeared on Fox News, CNN, and Arabic language television channels including Al Jazeera. middle ea st expertise:

w o r k ing it: art Artist Heidi Ma 13C enjoys a unique interconnection between science and art. This summer, she participated in an environmental research project to explore habitat preferences of local fish species and worked towards ecological restoration in rural homesteads of Bangladesh. To document her work, she “found that using sketches to communicate with farmers was the easiest and most interesting for them, especially because drawings can bridge all language barriers.” Ma is now a graduate student in biodiversity conservation and management at the University of Oxford in England.

working it: au tho r Fred W. Snell Jr. 58C published the medical memoir of his grandfather, Mather M. McCord 1902M. “My grandfather completed the manuscript before he died in 1953 but never had it published. Fifty years later, I knew his was a story that needed to be told,” Snell said. He dedicated himself to the task.

Detailing the horse-and-buggy era country doctor’s life following the Civil War, The Doctor Has Arrived shares the wisdom of a public health visionary. For Snell, the experience of publishing the book has been both cathartic and immensely rewarding: “Emory’s medical heritage is richer because of this work.”

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business communications environment The intersection of law & your industry finance healthcare HR intellectual property

Summon your potential with a Juris Master Degree

The law impacts every area of social and economic life. Understanding its influence on individual and institutional decisions has never been more crucial. The Juris Master (JM) is a customizable 24-credit-hour program that is designed to enhance your knowledge of the law within your chosen profession or industry. The degree can be completed full-time in one year or part-time in up to four years. Scholarships may be available to students pursing the JM degree.

Join us for an upcoming Information Session to learn more about this exciting degree.

Learn more at www.law.emory.edu/academics/jm-program/upcoming-events.html

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en! My new year this has be Wow! What a and Dreams EO of Wishes e career as the C ren all over th meeting child h keeps me busy ug ill run To never I can I st world, but whe shape. I’m ge to stay in colle Mudder races tasking so I’ve good at multiu getting pretty ell. I can tell yo w hobby as w ® car taken up a ne ula 1 e that my Form from experienc g to drive lin loud and thril is, in fact, both fore I close, I aco’s streets. Be through Mon at my beloved t you know th also want to le me top prize pette, took ho oo Sw u, tz ih sh e donated Show, and I’v in the EU Dog s scholarship ngs to Emory’ her prize winni ay be filled gh my days m initiative. Thou , every day I lenges and joys with new chal es I continue to r the great tim fo ul ef at gr am om Emory. dear friends fr share with my

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tribute

A Career Built on Heartbeats Embryology, the Johns Hopkins University, and both Emory’s School of Medicine and College of Arts and Sciences.

Born in Chicago, DeHaan was raised in California, where he attended UCLA. Robert DeHaan Graduate work took him to Amsterdam, then to UCLA to complete a doctorate, where his research focused upon cardiac electrophysiology, recalled his wife, Marianne Scharbo-DeHaan, who served as an associate professor in Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing from 1982 to 2000 before completing her career with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For many Emory medical students, DeHaan provided a critical—and memorable—introduction to embryology. “Because he was often [a med student’s] first professor, and a wonderful teacher, we often found that when we would go out to dinner, these doctors would come up and say, ‘Dr. DeHaan, I still remember that the heart starts beating at day twenty-one,’ ” Scharbo-DeHaan recalls. “Apparently, that left an impression.”

While at Emory, DeHaan was twice named Outstanding Teacher of the Year, in 1987 and 1990. He also received the university’s highest faculty accolade, the Thomas Jefferson Award, in 1998, and the Distinguished Emeritus Award in 2006.

Preceded in death by his first wife, Virginia S. DeHaan, DeHaan is survived by his son Benjamin DeHaan of Lucca, Italy; daughter Pippit Carlington and grandson Quinn Carlington of Atlanta. He is also survived by ScharboDeHaan, his wife of 23 years, and stepchildren Mark (Carrie) Scharbo, Grant (Gina) Scharbo and Dana (Josh) Lieberman, as well as ten grandchildren.—Kimber Williams

em o r y p h o t o / v i d e o

Professor Emeritus Robert DeHaan, whose intellect, energy, and research enriched three different disciplines at Emory, died October 29, 2013, of complications from pneumonia.

DeHaan, who was eighty-two, came to Emory in 1973 to study the intricacies of the human heart, including cutting-edge research into the electrophysiology of heartbeats. An acclaimed cell biologist, he is also widely remembered for teaching embryology in Emory’s School of Medicine, one of the first classes required of every medical student.

But his career and intellectual curiosity were far-reaching. Following his personal interests, DeHaan also helped found the Emory Center for Ethics and in the 1990s switched academic gears, focusing upon a major initiative to help improve science curriculum in elementary schools.

His research career spanned five decades, including positions on faculties of the Carnegie Institution of Washington Department of

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Raising a Tomgirl I am tying my toddler daughter’s shoes even after she insisted that she do it “all by herself ” when she looks down at my hands, touches my slightly dirty nails, and says, “You need your nails painted.”

I feel like I’ve failed a final exam after studying diligently for an entire semester. It’s not the nail test I care about; it’s the raising-a-tomboywho-defies-all-gender-policing test I’ve been studying for since the ultrasound technician said, “There’s our little lady!”

How does she know that? I thought later as I stalked the layette section of a department store, slightly dehydrated and drunk on the revelation that my baby shower would be full of pink. How does she know that her sex will determine her gender identity? Why pink? Why lace? Why ribbons? Why all of these embroidered hearts? The questions, the lights, the incessant elevator music, and the dehydration all made me a little dizzy.

The numbers were even more dizzying. My daughter would be born into a set of numbers that told a story about her life before she had a chance to live it. Black and female have been the topics of headline-worthy statistics since Patrick Moynihan made it his business to “study” the black family. When the topic is black girls and women, the words “research shows” are indicators that I should hold my breath and brace myself for more bad news.

I began to look for good news in my own literary research and found it in the strange autonomy of black girlhood. In the liminal space that Toni Morrison called “not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything,” the black girl subject of late-­twentieth-century literature created herself. In 1970, Morrison’s Claudia MacTeer dissassembled a baby doll to see what all the fuss over blue eyes was about. In 1972, Toni Cade Bambara’s Hazel observed that girls didn’t smile at each other “cause maybe we too busy being flowers or fairies or strawberries instead of something honest and worthy of respect . . . you know . . . like being people.” In 1973, Morrison’s Sula rejected so many societal constraints that she found herself on the margins of a community, foreign even to her best friend but entirely true to herself. In 1982, Alice Walker’s Shug Avery imagined herself 64

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connected to the divine through nature and sexuality, rejecting her preacher father’s piety and angry god.

The words spoken by these characters were scriptures for me, a first-time mother who experienced the world as a dangerous place.

These characters gave me hope that it was possible to thrive, not just exist, within the confines of race, class, and gender marginalization.

The girls and women in these novels bent a world to fit their understanding of it; they had the audacity to require those around them to follow suit. They defied numbers, healed their own wounds, and saved themselves.

To save my own daughter from the stories statistics tell, I bought pants—lots of them.

Many of the spunky girl characters I’d grown to love were tomboys who not only rejected the “girly” behavior their mothers tried to enforce, but scoffed at them. I bought trucks and train tracks and shopped in the boys’ section of the toy store. I watched Thomas, Elmo, and Caillou. I avoided Barbie like the plague. “Tell me why she sexis’, Mommy! Tell me!” my daughter screamed once as I accidentally rolled through an aisle that looked as if it had been drenched in Pepto Bismol.

But now, after all of the work I’ve done, all of the Disney princess merchandise I’ve refused to buy, all of the literary tomboy characters I’ve elevated to prophet status, I am tying the shoe of a little girl who insists on skirts, nail polish, and beads at the ends of her braids. And she is gender-policing me.

She wedges her tiny finger underneath my nail, trying to affect the rush cleaning job

I do on the nights when she says, “Mommy, paint my nails.” I think of what we do when I comply, the goofy stories we tell, the way I pretend to breathe dragon fire when I’m helping her dry her new polish. I think of the way she giggles when she looks at her nails—the way she thrives in these moments that are all about her. And now that she is cleaning my own nails, I realize that she is giving me her time.

If I’d let her near a bottle of polish again (a miracle saved my couch after her last attempt), she’d likely paint my nails for me. Maybe “you need your nails painted” is toddler-speak for “Mommy, I see you. You’re tired sometimes.

You rush. You don’t take time to sparkle. Let me help.”

I should be as observant as my daughter.

Then I would notice her toddler fierceness— her insistence on doing things all by herself—a resolve that rivals any of the characters I most revere. After all, it’s not just the gender performances that made my favorite characters radical. It’s the fact that they trusted their own choices; they didn’t seek permission to glory in their own bodies, which were always already marked by a nation’s unease.

In my lap is a girl who is learning to trust her own choices, and I am a mommy who is learning how to read the story she will write all by herself.

Asha French 14PhD is a freelance writer and an Emory doctoral candidate in the Department of English.

ill u s t r at i o n b y ja s o n r ai s h

by asha french 14 P h D

Have a plan.

They grew up in the same Decatur neighborhood, but Barbara Alford Reed 57N 79N and Bob Reed 57C didn’t connect until they were at Emory.

Their lives have been entwined with Emory ever since. They wed after their sophomore years and she worked for decades as a clinical faculty member at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. She also was a nurse at Emory University Hospital, where both of their sons were born. Longtime Emory supporters, they have made a bequest to create an endowed scholarship in nursing. “Emory gave me what I had always wanted, and that was to make a difference through nursing,” she says. He adds, “And Emory gave me Barbara.”

Learn how you can include Emory in your estate plans. Call 404.727.8875 or visit www.emory.edu/giftplanning.

Plan to champion what you love.

c u lt u r e c l ash : The exhibition Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, on view at the Michael C. Carlos Museum through March 9, reunites Bearden’s noted 1977 series of collages and watercolors inspired by Homer’s epic poem. To learn more, visit www.carlos.emory.edu.

Shown here: Battle with Cicones, courtesy Thompson Collection, Indianapolis, Indiana.

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