THE CHRONICLE
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2012 | 3
Two Duke alumni join Charlotte plant offers White House Fellows job creation lessons THE CHRONICLE
Two Duke alumni have been appointed to the 2012-2013 Class of White House Fellows. Dave Chokshi, Trinity ’03 and Kermit Jones, Law and Medical School ’05, were named by the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships Tuesday, among 15 total fellows. Created in 1964 by former President Lyndon Johnson, the White House Fellows Program was designed to give promising American leaders “first hand, high-level experience with the workings of the Federal government and to increase their sense of participation in national affairs.” The program is meant to encourage active citizenship and dedication to community service, giving fellows the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of current events and policy formulation. Fellows are selected based on their professional achievements, their demonstrated leadership capabilities and their dedication to public service. Chokshi, a primary care physician from Baton Rouge, La., graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Duke, where he was an A. B. Duke Scholar. He earned his M.D. with distinction from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Sc in global public health from the University of Oxford. He is a Rhodes Scholar, a Truman Scholar, a Soros Fellow and a Gamble Scholar. Chokshi recently finished his internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical
School. He has worked with the New York City Department of Health, the Louisiana Department of Health and a clinical software startup company, and has done work for multiple nonprofit organizations aimed at improving global health. Chokshi is a founding member of the board of directors for Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a nonprofit which seeks to provide better access to medicine for developing countries. He has clinical experience in Peru, Guatemala, India, Botswana and Ghana, and he is published in multiple journals on medicine and public health. Jones, a Mordecai Scholar during his time at the Duke, received his degrees in medicine and law from Duke in 2005. He recently completed his M.P.A. from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where he launched a chapter of Developments in Literacy—a nonprofit organization that has educated more than 16,000 elementary school students in Pakistan and provided guidance on technology use and teacher training. Before attending Columbia, Jones served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy, operating with a Marine helicopter casualty evacuation squadron in Iraq. Before his military service, Jones worked as a primary care physician with a rural health service at Christian Medical College in Vellore, India. He also studied AIDS-related public health legislation and the legal consequences of trade at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. —from Staff Reports
by Lori Montgomery THE WASHINGTON POST
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — As President Barakc Obama and presidential candidate Mitt Romney debate whether lower taxes or targeted investment would do more to create jobs, they would benefit from a trip to a brand-new manufacturing plant a few miles from the Charlotte arena where the Democratic National Convention is underway. The factory opened last year after German engineering giant Siemens AG chose this North Carolina city as a hub for making gigantic gas turbines needed to power new electric plants under construction around the globe. A few years ago, the factory and its 825 jobs might have gone to India, China or another low-wage country. This time, American workers won out. And that victory could be instructive as the candidates pledge to energize an economy struggling through its fourth straight year above 8 percent unemployment. Ask Siemens executives why they placed their bet on Charlotte and they talk about public investments such as the state-funded rail spur that runs through their facility and the city’s international airport, which recently added a fourth runway using $132 million in federal funds. They talk about the Export-Import Bank, an independent federal agency that in January approved a $638 mil-
lion loan to finance the sale of turbines to Saudi Arabia, helping Siemens beat bids from companies in Germany, South Korea and Japan. And they talk about the quality of the workforce in Charlotte, where local leaders are retooling the public education system to churn out the engineers and skilled technicians needed to operate one of the most efficient gas-turbine plants in the world. “A lot of things that were offshored in the past were offshored because of lower-cost labor, but that’s no longer the most important factor,” said Eric Spiegel, president and chief executive of Siemens’s U.S. subsidiary. “The reasons you bring a plant like this to the United States are higher-skilled labor, access to the world’s best research and development, and good, sound infrastructure. All those things together make the U.S. a good place to invest.” A visit to one factory cannot fully illuminate the complex matter of job creation, and one company’s choices cannot be extrapolated to every industry and region in the country. But the story of the Charlotte plant highlights the benefit of investing in essential services with long-term effects for a wide range of industries — rather than primarily cutting taxes, as Republicans propose, or showering benefits on certain industries, as the Obama administration has done with the clean-energy sector.
Get ready to make your travel plans The Duke Global Education Fair comes to the Bryan Center on Tuesday, September 11
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Look for your guide to the Fair in The Chronicle on Friday, September 7