By the numbers

The Graduate School received 7,329 applications for the 2006-2007 year. It matriculated 423 new PhD and 230 new Master’s students. The school presently has 2,234 PhD students enrolled, its largest number ever, and 565 students enrolled in Master’s programs. Click to view multi-year statistics for the school.

Highlights

The Graduate School wrapped up an 11-year run of the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP), designed to increase the number of students of color in the biomedical sciences.

The electronic-format PhD dissertation submission pilot program was highly successful during the 2006-07 academic year, and the Duke University Graduate School is planning to make the 2008-09 academic year the first year when all PhD dissertations must be submitted in electronic format.

Awards and recognition

Lisa Cavanaugh (PhD candidate in business) and Marc Reibold (PhD candidate in German) received the 2007 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Graduate School.

Susan Lozier (professor of earth and ocean sciences), Laurie Shannon (E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English), and Herbert Edelsbrunner (Arts and Sciences Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics) received the 2007 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring from the Graduate School.

Elizabeth Forwand won a Luce Scholarship for 2007-08.

Joe Volpe, a PhD student in bioinformatics and genome technology, was awarded the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) Haung Foundation Young Trainee award.

Yuan Yuan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion, was awarded a 2007 International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Science Research Council.

Gordon Mantler, a PhD candidate in the Department of History, was awarded a prestigious Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the 2007-08 academic year.

Three graduate students received the Graduate School’s first such awards for outstanding mentorship (of undergraduates or of fellow graduate students): Lawrence M. Boyd (biomedical engineering), Adam Hartstone-Rose (biological anthropology and anatomy), and Kristina McDonald (psychology and neuroscience).

Appointment

Ginny Buckner, formerly the director of the School of Education of Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, was appointed as director of Duke University’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program, effective June 2007.

Major gift

A $2-million endowment was established for the Hung Taiwan–Duke University Fellowship through a donation of $1 million from Hung and matching funds through the Financial Aid Initiative. The fellowship supports graduate students from Taiwan in science and engineering PhD programs at Duke University.