SOCIAL JUSTICE

UNPACKING EMORY'S HISTORY OF SLAVERY AND DISPOSSESSION

BY KELUNDRA SMITH

SOBERING VIEW This partial panorama of Oxford College from the 1890s includes Phi Gamma Hall, which is believed to have been erected by enslaved people.

Avis Williams 78Ox 98C 08T 18T never considered going to Oxford College of Emory University. Though she grew up nearby, she didn’t think she would be welcome there, even with grades in the top 1 percent of her class. But when she was admitted with a scholarship, her grandmother insisted that she attend. When she arrived on campus, her work-study assignment was in the library.

It was 1976. Although school desegregation had been the national law for more than twenty years and Emory had graduated its first African American students in 1963, there were still few Black or other students of color at the university. Williams was relieved to see a familiar face in the library; her grandmother’s friend was a custodial worker there.

She recalls inviting the woman to have lunch with her in the employee break room. Her grandmother’s friend refused, saying that custodial workers were not allowed to eat in that area. Williams watched as a woman she’d known her entire life ate her lunch in the mop closet. There was no formal policy that Black custodial staff could not eat in the break area, but there was an unspoken understanding that they were not welcome. For Williams, this simply would not do.

“I approached my supervisor, and I said that I thought the woman might be senile because she thought it was 1866 and not 1976,” says Williams. She recognized that humor might be an effective means to get her point across.

The next time Williams had a shift in the library, her grandmother’s friend was eating lunch in the employee break room.

“She said to me, ‘I don’t know what you did, but thank you,’ ” says Williams.

That lunch incident is but one in a series of injustices that mark Emory University’s history. As a member of the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium, the university is committed to unpacking its participation in acts of prejudice and discrimination so Emory can pave a new path forward, one characterized by unity and equity. This requires going all the way back to the early nineteenth century before the original campus at Oxford was built.

THE ORIGINAL SIN

The state of Georgia acquired the land where Emory’s Atlanta and Oxford campuses now sit as a result of the 1821 Treaty of Indian Springs. This treaty was one in a decades-long attempt to move the Muscogee (Creek) Indians off their land in Georgia and Alabama. Like previous treaties, the tribes agreed begrudgingly and under duress. By that time, the Muscogee had already ceded millions of acres due to threats of war by white settlers.

However, the US government and the state of Georgia still had their eyes on even more territory between the Muscogee and Cherokee. The tribes refused to give up that land and resisted moving west. Then, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the War Department resources to forcibly move any remaining Indians west of the Mississippi River. Most of them died on what is now called the Trail of Tears.

“The primary driver behind this dispossession was the desire to expand slavery, especially because in Virginia several generations of overtilling the soil made it less productive,” says Malinda Maynor Lowery, the Cahoon Family Professor of American History in Emory College. Lowery studies the Lumbee Indians in North Carolina and Indian removal policies. “They wanted to figure out how to expand their most profitable enterprise, which was buying and selling human beings.”

By 1836, the Methodist church received a charter from the state of Georgia to build a new liberal arts college. Two years later, the church broke ground on the first building in Oxford, Georgia. It is believed that enslaved people were used to erect Few Hall and Phi Gamma Hall.

This history is detailed in The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family by Mark Auslander, who taught at both the Oxford and Atlanta campuses.

Fast forward more than one hundred and sixty years. At the turn of twenty-first century, Oxford residents were at odds with the city council over inequitable upkeep of the segregated Oxford Cemetery. The African American section was overgrown, so Auslander, his students, and local congregations began a restoration project. In 2001, Oxford City Council and the cemetery foundation that funds the maintenance of the grounds, agreed to equitable upkeep of all burial plots. This work led Auslander to interview descendants of people who were believed to be enslaved by Emory’s early faculty members and trustees.

“I was told by elders in the Black community that to understand issues such as voting rights, unequal access to resources, etc., you had to look at the cemetery,” says Auslander, who is now a visiting scholar at Brandeis University and a visiting faculty member at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“I started to see a whole story that had been hiding in the light about how essential slavery was to the founding of the institution. They were getting vital tuition money from the sons of Caribbean and Southern plantation owners. . . . I was curious as to what this experience was like for the African Americans who were living at this time.”

Though there are no records that the university ever owned any slaves, “Kitty’s Cottage” in Oxford stands as evidence of Emory’s entanglement with the institution of slavery. Catherine Andrew Boyd, sometimes called “Miss Kitty,” was enslaved by the president of the Emory College Board of Trustees, Bishop James O. Andrew.

For Boyd’s descendants, she is more than a symbol, and preserving the dignity of her legacy is a must.

“When Mark Auslander called in 2009, I was gobsmacked,” says Darcel Caldwell, one of Boyd’s great-greatgreat granddaughters. “When we came down for the [Slavery and the University] conference in 2011, the Oxford community was very generous and loving to my sister and me. They accepted us like long-lost children.”

Before the conference, the Emory Board of Trustees issued a statement of regret and acknowledged some of the descendants of the enslaved. Caldwell and her sister, Cynthia Martin, were given a quilt made by artist Lynn Linnemeier called “Miss Kitty’s Cloak” in her honor. The university also built a new headstone for Boyd, who is the only known person of color buried in the white section of Oxford Cemetery.

“I’m grateful to Emory, and I’m glad Emory is making the steps to do something,” says Caldwell. “Slavery denied people education and jobs, and addressing those issues would be one of the many ways Emory could atone. I think Emory can set an excellent example in that regard.”

Last year, Emory President Gregory L. Fenves announced the creation of the Descendants Endowment to provide scholarships for two undergraduate students each year who are descended from enslaved people with ties to Emory University. The first scholarships are anticipated to be offered for fall 2022.

ONCE-NATIVE LANDS Georgia land cessions map shows treaties with Native American tribes.

BURIED TRUTHS Catherine “Miss Kitty” Andrew Boyd is the only known African American buried in the white section of Oxford Cemetery. (top) Kitty’s Cottage on Oxford Campus, present day. (bottom) In 2011, Emory unveiled a new headstone for Boyd.

The Descendants Endowment is a step toward addressing one aspect of Emory’s history, but the university impact goes beyond the Quad.

CHANGE COMES SLOWLY

After Emancipation and the turn of the century, inequitable treatment of certain groups continued. In 1919, the college expanded to Atlanta where plantations once stood. Auslander believes that descendants of formerly enslaved people were paid substandard wages to work on both campuses.

That includes Anderson Wright, an African American who never attended Oxford or Emory but grew up near Oxford College. His grandfather was a landscaper there, and his grandmother did laundry for students and faculty. In 1952, while he was in high school, Wright worked in the cafeteria at Oxford washing dishes and made $0.45 an hour.

According to the US Census, the average household income in 1952 was $2,300 per year. Wright recalls full-time cafeteria employees at Emory making $17 per week, or closer to $884 annually. Seeing the limited opportunities for people in his community, Wright enlisted in the US Navy after high school and worked at the US Postal Service in California for most of his career.

“Growing up, it was so many young people that would have wanted to go to college there, but weren’t allowed to,” says Wright, who is now vice president of the Oxford Historic Cemetery Foundation. “I probably would have been one of them.”

Though African Americans worked at the university from its founding, the first Black students were not admitted to

Emory University until the 1960s. Brown v. Board of Education integrated public schools, but the state of Georgia maintained segregation in private schools. They threatened a significant tax penalty for schools that admitted non-white students.

Henry L. Bowden, the university’s general counsel as well as board chairman at the time, and Ben F. Johnson Jr., dean of the School of Law, took the case to the Georgia Supreme Court and won—allowing Emory to admit all qualified students without penalty.

Verdelle Bellamy 63N and Allie Saxon 63N were the first two African American

students to graduate from Emory, when they each earned a master’s degree in nursing in 1963. Charles Dudley 67C was the first African American undergraduate admitted to Emory College, and he graduated with a degree in history in 1967.

Marsha Houston 68C was a part of one of the first integrated classes that enrolled in fall 1964. When she arrived on campus, she did not expect to see many brown faces, but she was not prepared for social isolation. She recalls that during her sophomore year in McTyeire Hall a group of white male students draped in white sheets burned a cross beneath her window. The incident is jauntily documented in the 1967 yearbook.

“At the time, I don’t think there was a single predominantly white school that knew what to do to create a welcoming environment for Black students,” says Houston. “The only Black people on campus were grounds people, cafeteria workers, and custodians. If you had an academic or psychological problem, there was no one to talk to.”

Houston eventually found a place to belong in the performing arts. Her senior year, she collaborated with fellow students to produce Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred. The event was a fundraiser for what they hoped would become a Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship. Alumni, faculty, staff, and students continued fundraising for many years. Today, Emory College awards the Martin Luther King, Jr.–Woodruff Scholarship every year to incoming students who graduate from a public high school in the city of Atlanta.

A LEGACY OF STUDENT ACTIVISM

In 1969, the newly formed Black Student Alliance protested on the steps of Candler Library for four days. The year before the protest, African American students sent a list of eight areas of concern to then President Sanford Atwood. A year later they had not seen action.

On the list, they addressed working conditions for Black employees, admission policies, diversifying the curriculum

by establishing a Black Studies program, and the need for a permanent Black cultural space.

Wages and work conditions for Black employees in the Cox Hall cafeteria were of particular concern. One Sunday afternoon, Black students stood in front of the entrance and food lines with memos stating that Emory discourages Black employees from advocating for better wages by “holding a two-cent raise over them.” The school requested a restraining order against the students. The protests ended with faculty and administration agreeing to most of the student demands.

That included the hiring of Delores P. Aldridge in 1971. Aldridge was the first African American to hold a tenure-track position in the college, and she became the founding director of the Department of African American Studies.

In 1990, 2015, and 2020, Black students at Emory University stood on the shoulders of those who came before and continued to issue lists of demands to administrators to address racial and social justice issues on campus. The 2020 list includes a range of items from ongoing sensitivity training for faculty and administrators to disarming and defunding campus police. Some of the items on the list mirrored what Black students asked for fifty years earlier, including “the protection and preservation of designated Black spaces.”

Student protests helped spark the university’s hiring of Carol Henderson to be the first chief diversity officer and vice provost in 2019. Henderson’s office is tasked with making sure that all faculty, staff, students, and job applicants are protected from discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or belief.

“The institutional work I help to lead—with many campus partners invested in this work—is an intentional journey to realize a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive Emory,” Henderson says. “That means taking a hard look at some painful and disturbing truths about a history whose remnants can still be felt today. We, as an institution, must be courageous in acknowledging and dismantling systemic barriers of exclusion, inequity, and inhumaneness at all levels of the institution.”

She adds: Our students and other change agents have led the way. Their presence and resolute energy are welcomed in this work as they hold us accountable to realize real change.”

THE WAY FORWARD

In recent years, the university has also established several working groups to tackle Emory’s complex history. Former Emory University President Claire E. Sterk and former Provost Dwight A. McBride created the Task Force on Untold Stories and Disenfranchised Populations in 2019 following the resurfacing of disturbing images in Emory yearbooks, such as the one of a burning cross outside of Marsha Houston’s dormitory.

When Fenves started in 2020, he recharged the committee and expanded their scope to include reevaluating Emory’s founding narratives. As a result of that committee’s work, the university is commissioning twin memorials to “honor those enslaved persons with ties to Emory and Indigenous peoples on whose land Emory’s campus was erected.”

That same year, Fenves appointed the University Committee on Naming Honors. In May 2021, that committee

BRAVE FACES (top) Marsha Houston in an after-class discussion about race on campus with Jack Boozer, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Religion, and others in 1968; (below left) Anderson Wright, present day, vice president of the Oxford Historic Cemetery Foundation; (below right) Avis Williams, present day, sits on a bench near her old residence hall at Oxford.

recommended that Emory discontinue the conferral of naming honors for Atticus Greene Haygood, L.Q.C. Lamar, George Foster Pierce, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and Robert Yerkes.

Thus far, the Longstreet-Means residence hall, which was named after Emory’s second president (1839–1848), has been renamed Eagle Hall. The chair named for him in the Department of English has been renamed as the Emory College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English.

These recommendations are based, in part, on Longstreet’s strong defense of slavery while he served as Emory president.

In addition, Language Hall at Oxford College was renamed in honor of Horace J. Johnson Jr. 77Ox 79B. Johnson went on to become the first

Black superior court judge in the Alcovy Judicial Circuit.

Progress for Native American and Indigenous students has been slower. Emory currently has twenty-four students who self-identify as American Indian/Alaska Native, four faculty and staff members, and just over two hundred alumni.

One of those graduates was Twilla Haynes 80N, a member of the Lumbee tribe. In 1980, she became the first Native American to earn a master’s degree from the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. Later in that decade, she also became the nursing school’s first Native American faculty member.

Her daughters Hope Haynes Bussenius 93N and Angela Haynes Ferere 91PH 98N 09N also earned nursing degrees from Emory and teach here today. Together, they started Hope Haven Orphanage and Eternal Hope in Haiti. During the summers, Haynes took Emory students abroad to learn and practice skills there.

She earned the Emory Medal in 2010. She died in 2020, and the Twilla Haynes Faculty Award Fund has been established in her honor.

In addition to trailblazers like Haynes, the Emory Native American Initiative is meant to encourage more Indigenous students to apply for admission to the university.

Students such as junior Sierra Talavera-Brown 23C want to create a stronger sense of belonging for Indigenous students on campus. Talavera-Brown, who is a human biology and anthropology major, grew up in Guilford, Connecticut, where she often felt isolated in her predominantly white schools. When she came to Emory, she found herself longing for a sense of community. “It’s hard to imagine some of my cousins going to Emory because of the social exclusion and lack of acknowledgment,” says Talavera-Brown, a Dine woman and a member of the Navajo Nation. “The impostor syndrome and feeling like you’re not good enough. . . . I grew up having to do that.” She and others are working to create the first organization for Indigenous students in Emory University’s history.

This fall, Fenves announced that the Board of Trustees has approved an official land acknowledgment that recognizes “the Muscogee (Creek) people

A TIME FOR PROTEST Following the killings of unarmed Black people by police, Emory students staged a “die-in” protest in 2014; Students protest at Cox Hall in 1969 over concerns of inequitable wages for dietary staff employees.

THEN AND NOW (top) A 1925 aerial view of original buildings on Emory University’s Oxford campus constructed by enslaved people. (bottom) Oxford College of Emory University, present day.

who lived, worked, produced knowledge on, and nurtured the land where Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses are now located” and “the sustained oppression, land dispossession, and involuntary removals of the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples from Georgia and the Southeast.”

Fenves also announced the formation of a working group to advance plans for the development of an outdoor Language Path on the Emory campuses to honor the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and highlight the Muscogee language and culture.

“I think our ancestors would be proud of the work that we are doing now,” says Lowery, who helped write the acknowledgment and will serve as co-chair of the Language Path working group. “The Muscogee Nation has had such a long history of education on this land. Knowledge is not something you hoard, it’s something you share.”

As Emory looks toward the future, the goal is to create a greater sense of belonging for everyone who arrives on campus.

“I am inspired by the engaged Emory faculty, staff, students, and alumni who have the courage to hold our institution accountable,” says Fenves, “and lead us in telling a more complete story about where we have been and who we are so we can build a more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and vibrant university.”

A SYMPOSIUM ON RACISM AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Among many universities across the country that have been researching their connections to slave labor and Indigenous dispossession, Emory hosted a symposium to examine its legacy of racism and start dialogues with students, faculty, staff, and the community on how the institution can further restorative justice.

Held September 29 through October 1 on both the Emory and Oxford campuses, the symposium called “In the Wake of Slavery and Dispossession,” featured a wide range of panel discussions, open conversations, and creative interpretations to capture the perspectives of Black, Native American, and Indigenous peoples.

You can view full recordings of the sessions led by leading scholars on slavery and dispossession, Emory student activists, artists and musicians, and descendants of enslaved people at youtube.com/emoryuniversity. Click on the playlist tab to scroll through all the sessions.

wIth a FL URISH

Meet sixteen of Emory’s best and brightest students— from undergraduates to PhD candidates—and find out how the university is helping them flourish by preparing them for a lifelong journey of transformation, contribution, and service.

It’s no secret that Emory students rank among the finest in the country. And the university’s No. 1 priority is to help them flourish, realize their potential, and excel in all aspects of their lives.

That means creating an inclusive environment where they feel at home, strengthening their values, developing their skills, preparing them for advanced and professional studies, and equipping them to succeed in their careers.

“Student flourishing is about being intentional in how we prepare our students for not only professional achievement but also success in life— providing resources and creating space that allow students to find their purpose through critical thinking and self-reflection,” says Ravi Bellamkonda, Emory provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.

These sixteen students featured here embody the spirit of Emory. They are thinkers, doers, innovators, and team players. And they all want to make a difference.

Their success here at Emory in the classroom, in their labs, through their community service, and as leaders in student organizations empowers them to head out into the greater world and serve humanity.

THE YEAR 2020 proved to be one for the history books, marked by a global pandemic, civil unrest, and one of the most contentious elections in modern American history. Lisa Chung was finishing a master’s degree program in the Rollins School of Public Health while conducting COVID-19 research and getting people to the polls.

Her interest lies at the intersection of infectious diseases and social epidemiology. During the final year of her master’s program, Chung worked with Professor Jodie Guest, vice chair of the Rollins Department of Epidemiology, on the Emory COVID-19 Outbreak Response Team. She also helped write the COVID-19 prevention plan for the Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska.

“The pandemic highlighted a large gap of understanding in health as well as significant health inequities in Georgia and around the world, which is a large part of why I applied for a doctoral program,” says Chung, who previously studied viral infections in cancer patients at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

In addition to pandemic prevention work, Chung, with the support of fellow students and faculty, co-led the Rollins Election Day Initiative to remove academic barriers to voting. Election day is now a Rollins-wide holiday—something Chung hopes will spread across campus. “Public health is not partisan, but it is political,” Chung says. “When constituents lose their access to the ballot, not having representation translates to policies that can have an impact on their health.”

Chung has earned several awards for her work, including Emory’s Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award and the Dr. Kathleen R. Miner Scholarship for Public Health Excellence. She also received the Marion Luther Brittain Award, which recognizes “significant, meritorious, and devoted service to Emory University with no expectations of recognition or reward.”

With the support of her community at Rollins, Chung is pursuing a PhD in epidemiology at Emory with Guest as her academic adviser. “I have received a fantastic education at Rollins, but the people make this a more meaningful place to be,” Chung says. “You can find inspiration and encouragement everywhere.”

—Kelundra Smith

EYEING A FUTURE WITHOUT PUBLIC HEALTH DISPARITIES

E. LISA CHUNG 21PH 27PhD

Epidemiologist, doctoral candidate, and voting rights activist

SUPPORTING HER ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

JORDYN TURNER 22B

Serial entrepreneur, innovator, and marketing and sociology student

GROWING UP in Houston, Texas, Jordyn Turner says she was a crafty child, selling earrings, Rexlace keychains, and even ballerina tutus to classmates.

When it was time to look at colleges, she was determined to find a place that would support her entrepreneurial spirit and celebrate diversity. Now a senior majoring in consulting and sociology, Emory has offered her both. She also had the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream when she received a scholarship to study abroad in Spain for six weeks.

“I remember seeing the Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority houses, and I knew this was the place for me, not because I wanted to join one of those sororities, but because [the presence of those houses meant] I wouldn’t have to sacrifice Blackness for academics,” Turner says.

Since enrolling at Emory, Turner has found a supportive community, grown one business, and started another. Her first company, A+ Academic Services, matches college tutors with K-12 students. She’s now working to transform A+ into an educational software product that offers tutoring in core subjects, the arts, and trades.

The desire to go digital is inspired by her second business, the Neos app, in which users create visually driven, digital “business cards” to connect with those who share similar interests and causes. Turner started Neos through the Hatchery, Emory’s student start-up incubator, where she currently works.

“It’s one thing to have methodical programs, but [at the Hatchery] we talk about the mental struggles of being an entrepreneur and how to cancel the noise and focus on one idea,” Turner says.

Turner’s ambition has helped her attain tuition scholarships and caught the attention of the Atlanta Business Chronicle, which named her on their list of twenty-three Atlanta-based innovators under the age of twenty-five. Now, Turner says she wants to focus on paying it forward. “It made the biggest difference when I realized I didn’t have to divorce my love for humanity from my passion for business,” Turner says.

She adds, “I had a five-year plan and during the pandemic a lot of things shifted for me internally. . . . I think the thing that excites me the most is there is some uncertainty about my future now.”

–Kelundra Smith

CAT DYMOND 20N 21N

Visionary midwife, nursing student, and mother of two

ACCORDING TO the Centers

for Disease Control and Prevention, Black and Indigenous women are three times more likely to die from preventable complications during childbirth than white women. For Cat Dymond, this just won’t do, which is why in 2016 they cashed out their 401(k) and moved from Boston to Atlanta to earn a bachelor’s degree from Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.

Dymond, who has two adult children, has been a doula for twenty-seven years, providing her services free of charge. They earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a concentration in maternal-child health from Harvard University. They see nursing as an extension of their earlier work with people experiencing homelessness as well as women who survived domestic violence. While working at a women’s health center in Houston, they had an encounter that changed their life.

“One night a woman showed up after having experienced an assault,” Dymond says. “Even though we were not an emergency room, the sexual assault nurse examiner, who was also a midwife, was so warm, tender, and respectful. I thought that’s what I want to do. It’s not just about catching babies;

SEEKING A BETTER it’s about providing health care in the BIRTHING EXPERIENCE midwifery model of care with a con FOR MOTHERS sciousness of trauma and culture.” Since enrolling at Emory, Dymond has entrenched theirself in the community. They are a Woodruff fellow and serve on the Dean’s Executive Student Council. Dymond interned at Grady Hospital in the emergent dialysis unit, which serves people who are dying due to lack of access to dialysis care. They also earned the Emory Alumni Association Leadership Scholarship, as well as a scholarship from the nonprofit Midwives for Black Lives. At the 2020 nursing commencement, Dymond received the Excellence in Social Responsibility Award. Now, they are finishing their master’s degree in nursemidwifery. After graduation, Dymond hopes to bring maternal health care to the people through a mobile midwifery service. They recently won a microgrant from the Hatchery, Emory’s student start-up incubator, to begin delivering care. “Beyond the bedside, nursing education is visionary,” Dymond says. “Here I am a middle-aged woman, and I upended my life, and it was worth it. I’m so proud to be a nurse, and I’m looking forward to what I do with it.”–Kelundra Smith

GIVING VOICES TO THE VOICELESS

Rodrigo Salinas 24C

Chemist, musician, and student mentor

RODRIGO SALINAS

came to Emory to study chemistry, but since he arrived, he’s found that and so much more. In fact, he says Emory has helped him find his voice—both as a leader and an artist. “Emory sets students up for success by providing opportunities that we do not normally have,” says Salinas. “Many students come from diverse backgrounds, where they may not be able to conduct research, participate in educational discourse, or even just have advisers that serve as advocates for them.”

He has benefited from that advocacy, first as an incoming student receiving guidance from mentors, and now, as a second-year student helping others and passing down that compassion. Salinas has met one-on-one with students from underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds who might not feel comfortable talking directly to a professor or even being in that formal sort of academic environment. At the same time, his professors have helped him pursue his personal passion for chemistry and his aspiration to become a physician.

Meanwhile, an Emory scholarship has also empowered Salinas to indulge his love of music; he receives free private lessons on clarinet and bass clarinet and virtual performances from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “I wouldn’t be able to attend Emory or participate in orchestra or even have my own instrument without that scholarship,” he says. “I hope that Emory continues to be inclusive, because I believe that a lot of untapped potential rests within those who work extremely hard from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This all helps Emory give voices to the voiceless.”—Tony Rehagen

BELIEVING HEALTH AND WELL-BEING UNDERPINS EVERY- THING IN OUR LIVES

MCKAYLAH HILLIARD 22B 23PH

Nurse, innovator, and future health care administrator

MCKAYLAH HILLIARD has

always known that whatever she does in life, she wants to make sure she has the broadest possible impact, both in terms of how many people she helps and her impact on the project, job, or profession as a whole.

When it came to health care, that meant Hilliard felt compelled to leave life as a registered nurse where she felt she was only treating one patient and one family at a time to focus on the entire health care system. That’s why she’s currently a second-year MBA candi-

date at Goizueta Business School focusing on hospital administration and operations. “I think that your health and well-being as a person is pretty fundamental to everything else in your life,” says Hilliard. “That was a big driver for me in choosing a career.”

Another powerful driver for Hilliard toward her ongoing commitment to and career in health care was the experience of her sister, who struggled with chronic pain for decades. She saw her bounced between doctors and specialists before finally getting diagnosed with a genetic disorder last year.

“It was a really difficult place to be in, feeling like you couldn’t do a whole lot to help,” says Hilliard. “Just seeing that for many, many years growing up really made me want to go into the health care industry and hopefully do something to help people.”

And thanks to Emory, Hilliard hopes to drive innovation in health care systems all over the world to improve the health and well-being of entire populations and communities.—Tony Rehagen

STRIVING TO BECOME AN INFLUENTIAL SCIENTIST AND MENTOR

JORDAN LEWIS 22PhD

Evolutionary biologist, disease researcher, and diversity advocate THE COMPLEXITY of disease

fascinates Jordan Lewis. As a PhD candidate in the Population

Biology, Ecology, and Evolution program at Laney Graduate School, Lewis is decoding how host-parasite relationships evolve, and how hosts evolve to defend themselves and reproduce. His research as an evolutionary biologist focuses on a worm, C. elegans, the first multicellular organism to have its entire genome sequenced. This makes the worm highly useful for identifying human disease genes and improved ways to diagnose and treat disease. The recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Lewis is helping decode biodiversity and diversify research science.

As a fellow for Emory Diversifying Graduate Education, Lewis recruits talent like himself. And as a Nat C. Robertson Graduate Fellow in Science and Society, he teaches Emory College undergraduates and shares graduate-level concepts with those interested in biology, medicine, and ethics careers.

Today, he notes, about 6 percent of PhDs in life sciences are held by Black scientists; that figure is less than 1 percent in evolutionary biology. “My field needs me,” says Lewis, who hopes to lead a research lab one day. “After Emory, I want to be not only an influential scientist, but also an influential mentor, making the field more diverse and inclusive, and also making it a field that students enjoy more.”

—Michelle Hiskey

PAYING IT FORWARD TO THOSE IN NEED

WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS

emerged in March 2020, Bryn Walker quickly found a way to help. The history major shared a Google doc listing contacts and resources at Emory to her friends and classmates to assist them in figuring out what to do about housing, moving, storage, and other immediate matters following the sudden closure of the university. Her message acknowledged the fear many of her classmates felt, especially those who were food insecure, and rallied others to pitch in: “We stand together as a community as we face this crisis,” she wrote.

Walker’s selfless action paid forward the support she had been given as a first-generation college student from Terre Haute, Indiana. The close community at Oxford College helped her feel at home, and she excelled in the warm welcome. “Not really knowing what I was doing going into college, it really helped to be a part of such a tight-knit community and to have so much support from faculty and students who

really believed in me,” says Walker, BRYN WALKER 20Ox 22C who returns to Oxford regularly. “I Undergraduate researcher, Library of really, really value my education

Congress intern, and historian and getting to just read and write and study all the time. That’s the dream and I’m grateful. I’m able to do that because of the sacrifices that my parents made. I hope to make them proud, and I hope to make the community proud of me as well.” Walker has thrived in her history studies, and she has earned the John and Ouida Temple Scholarship, Oxford College American History Award, and Woodruff Dean’s Achievement Scholarship. Her academic record, including an Undergraduate Research Fellowship, led to her securing a prestigious position at the Library of Congress, as a teaching with primary sources intern that started in January 2021. Just as Emory invested in her, she reaches out to others in need, following the motto: “If you are more fortunate than others, build a longer table not a taller fence.”—Michelle Hiskey

AS A FOURTH-YEAR doctoral student studying sensory learning—specifically how humans process and use sound socially—Dakshitha Anandakumar spends a lot of hours exploring how personal experiences shape social behaviors. Her own experiences as an international student hailing from a small village in India have transformed her into a more empathetic and courageous person and have motivated her to take on leadership roles on campus. That’s why, last year, she volunteered to serve as vice president of community engagement for the Graduate Student Association. “The most fulfilling part of graduate school has been helping people find their communities and putting together resources that uplift people from nontraditional backgrounds,” says Anandakumar.

In recognition of those efforts, she was recently awarded the Emory Alumni Board Leadership Scholarship. “Receiving this scholarship gives me validation and makes me feel appreciated; it has motivated me to keep contributing to the benefit of nontraditional students,” she says.

Anandakumar is grateful to Emory for the education, experience, and exposure that she continues to receive. “Growing up, working, let alone higher education, was not really expected or encouraged for girls by our family or teachers,” she says. “However, when I came here, the support and concern shown by the community at Emory helped create an enriching learning environment where students like me feel comfortable to share opinions and have open discussions.”

In her three years at Emory, she’s noticed a marked shift in the campus culture toward more diversity and inclusiveness, including more philanthropic support for students and families that might not otherwise be able to afford the educational opportunities. “All these students have to do is open themselves up to the experience. I learned to go out there and make time to take up leadership roles,” she says. “I didn’t just close myself in the lab. I learned to put myself out there and seek opportunities. And I have seen results.”—Tony Rehagen

HELPING NONTRADITIONAL STUDENTS FIND A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

DAKSHITHA ANANDAKUMAR 24PhD

Neuroscientist, volunteer, and campus leader

THRIVING ON CONNECTIONS

SARAH FINCH 24PhD AND JAMES FINCH 24PhD

AI language researchers, innovators, and childhood sweethearts who married

CAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE solve our

loneliness and disconnection? That provocative question drives James Finch and Sarah Finch, two very connected humans in the Laney Graduate School. Married in 2019 and both recipients of the George W. Woodruff Fellowship, the Finches made headlines when their fourteen-person Emory team won the $500,000 global 2020 Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge.

Their invention Emora—a feminized version of Emory—is programmed to ask questions, make inferences, and understand opinions. Basically, it engages in dialogues with humans candidly through a smart speaker or other Internet-connected device and responds as a friend would. “A back-and-forth collaborative experience” is how Sarah Finch describes it.

To fine-tune Emora’s ability to communicate, the Finches rely on their own. “We’re dealing with very complex ideas on a daily basis. Transmitting an idea to another human brain in a reasonable amount of time is very difficult, and there’s constant miscommunication that happens,” James Finch says. “That’s not so much of a hurdle between us. We almost always feel like we can understand each other.”

“If we can create more flexible and robust dialogue capability in machines,” Sarah Finch explains, “a more natural, conversational interface could replace pointing, clicking, and hours of learning a new software interface. Everyone would be on a more equal footing because using technology would become easier.”

Emora is hoped to help people who are isolated, depressed, or have a neurological dis-

ease like Alzheimer’s. The Finches use a mathematical formulation called predicate logic to enable a computer to manipulate information received from a human and make inferences. Emora can remember, for example, whether the user has a pet or just bought a home, and connect related concepts.

Because big life decisions like buying a house are more important than buying groceries, for instance, Emora can infer that someone who adopts a pet or buys a house is excited. “The key is for Emora to remember things that the user has shared in the past and leverage that information to make even better conversations that are more personal,” James Finch says.

The Finches have worked in sync since they were thirteen-year-olds in the same math class in Grand Blanc, Michigan. As undergraduates at Michigan State, they discovered a passion for tackling the limits of computerized dialogue systems, which led to the Emory Department of Computer Science Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory.

“Who doesn’t want to be able to talk to their computer, right?” James says. “We just wanted to see if we could crack this really hard AI problem that’s been basically unsolved for decades. We believe that a free exchange of information between a computer and human was the only strategy that really has a possibility of working long term.”

Upon earning PhDs, Sarah Finch hopes to continue her work in private industry, while her husband aspires to a career in academia.

—Michelle Hiskey

SOLIDIFYING MY PASSIONS

CUTLER CANNON 20Ox 22C

Medical linguist, phytochemist, and future physician

CUTLER CANNON grew up on a sheep farm in a small country town just north of Dallas. He says being surrounded by nature–in conjunction with his Jewish upbringing–greatly influenced his views on herbal medicines and traditional therapies and how they can be used alongside modern medicine to treat patients.

Since middle school, Cannon started following the work of Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory who studies the use of botanical remedies to treat infectious diseases (see Quave’s story on page 8). So, when it came time to apply to college, Cannon had a good idea where he wanted to go.

“The problem with the integration of botanical medicine and traditional therapies is that there is a lot of stigma that follows it,” says Cannon. “People think it’s pseudoscience and ‘fake’ medicine, but the biochemistry says otherwise.”

By coming to Emory and joining the Quave Research Group, Cannon was able to work alongside Quave in her cutting-edge lab. The experience provided Cannon with access to modern research techniques and a legitimate path forward in the field of medical ethnobotany.

Once this fourth-year Emory student graduates with his bachelor’s degree in linguistics, Cannon plans to pursue a master’s degree in ethnobotany before moving on to medical school. He hopes to use this platform to further extol the benefits of integrative therapies and change how medicine is perceived and taught around the country.

“It’s exciting to see how Emory is catering to these rather avant-garde research initiatives,” says Cannon. “If I had gone somewhere else, there wouldn’t have been an ethnobotany lab; there wouldn’t have been an experience to solidify where my passion is, and I wouldn’t be able to confidently say that this is what I’m meant to pursue. Now, with Emory coursework and Quave’s mentorship under my belt, I can definitively say that this was the right decision and that I can clearly see a path ahead.”

—Tony Rehagen

SERVING MY FELLOW CLASSMATES AND MY UNIVERSITY

RACHEL DING 20Ox 22B

Political scientist, global citizen, and community builder

EVEN THOUGH her older sister had attended Emory years before her, Rachel Ding was still eager to see if Emory’s reputation as an elite institution of higher learning was a reality. It wasn’t until she herself arrived at the Oxford College campus and got involved in the Oxford College Student Government Association, that Ding realized the university was also a close-knit community. “I really felt like key professors, administrators, staff, and also, just the campus itself invested in me,” she says. “I don’t think I would’ve felt that valued as an individual at any other college.”

A fourth-year student majoring in finance and international studies, Ding also quickly found that Emory was her gateway to a global business community—including a deeply rooted relationship with the world-renowned Carter Center. “Emory has given me many opportunities to study international relations,” she says. “I have the privilege of taking classes and learning from really notable people within the international community.”

One of those professors, Yawei Liu, director of the Carter Center China program, has also taught her much about her own heritage and opened up an aspect of political science that she had never before explored. Ding imagines herself one day building upon what she learned at Emory into a career with an organization overseas, where she hopes to help foster diplomacy in international development.

But first, like any upstanding community member, Ding is working to give back to the school and student body that has provided her with all of these advantages—by serving as president of the Emory University Student Government Association, marking her second presidency during her time at Emory. “I hope to make Emory a more welcoming place,” she says. “I truly want to make Emory somewhere where we have a community spirit and where we feel like we can all belong. I want to create an environment where students learn how to exist in the world as good, ethical human beings.”—Tony Rehagen where Emory students tutor kids in Atlanta Public Schools. “The way the kids engage with stories in such a sensory way—only as a child did I get that absorbed into a story,” says MacDonald. “A lot of what I did was reading with them and having them read to me. When you see that one-on-one impact, you can feel the influence that you’re having.”

MacDonald is also a member of Emory’s crew team. Though they were unable to compete in 2020, members used their time to give back by donating money to Legal Aid Atlanta following protests for social justice. He says the team is also becoming more intentional about trying to diversify the sport.

After graduation, MacDonald hopes to continue researching language evolution. He’s waiting to hear back about a Fulbright to conduct research at the University of Edinburgh. Until then, he’s enjoying the journey. “I kind of feel like my experience is a sample platter of everything Emory has to offer,” he says. “Emory gives you all the tools you need for success. It’s really up to you to put them together and build something.”

–Kelundra Smith

USING LANGUAGE TO TRANSFORM LIVES

CALEN MACDONALD 22C

Undergraduate researcher, crew team member, and writer

MANY PEOPLE played “telephone” growing up, passing a message from person to person and seeing how it changed by the time it got to the final recipient. This childhood game provides insight into language evolution for Emory senior Calen MacDonald, who’s conducting research with Professor Benjamin Wilson in the Department of Psychology.

The research marries MacDonald’s two majors: neuroscience with a concentration in behavioral biology and creative writing. He is intrigued by how language is passed down and how people receive messages based on their connotations with various symbols, words, and objects. “I’m really interested in storytelling and the way that humans express themselves, says MacDonald, who grew up in Palmetto, Florida. “I think that’s how we connect and how we frame what we do. I want to understand the way we put together the narratives of our lives.”

His interests also coalesce with Emory Reads, a volunteer program

TAKING A BOLD PATH TO PAY IT FORWARD

JULIE WECHSLER 21C

Fulbright Scholar, committed mentor, and health communicator

JULIE WECHSLER’S journey at

Emory from follower to leader was short—and influenced her daily walks around campus, too. She says she took advice from students who were older than her and had been down the path before and made it seem like it was possible, and then learned from tracing their footsteps.

She started on this journey just before her first year in college, leaving her comfort zone in Durham, North Carolina, early to participate in Emory’s Student Outdoor Adventure Retreat (SOAR)—a three-day pre-orientation program designed to build community among incoming students. It opened Wechsler’s eyes, and she’s since became a SOAR leader herself, a peer mentor in the Emory Pre-Health Advising Office, a mentor for local students in the Emory Pipeline Collaborative, and an undergraduate teaching assistant in the Emory Program in Linguistics.

“Sharing what kind of decisions I made and seeing how that really helped other students along their paths, made me feel like my opinion was really useful to somebody else,” Wechsler says.

Bumping into mentees around campus boosts her Emory experience, too. “Getting everybody out of their comfort zones through SOAR and other advising situations was really bonding and created some lasting relationships,” she says. Wechsler is passionate about using communication as a critical tool for better health. In fact, she founded JHealth, a leadership development and educational program that promotes Jewish perspectives on bioethics and other health care topics.

A recent Emory graduate, Wechsler will soon be conducting research in Spanish as a Fulbright Scholar in Peru. Her project focuses on the impact of a national registry of medical interpreters and translators of Indigenous languages. Thanks to her research experiences and her incredible mentors, she feels prepared to undertake this work in January.—Michelle Hiskey

LEARNING sCIENCE AND MEDICINE ARE NO LONGER INDIVIDUAL SPORTS

CAREY JANSEN 22PhD 24M

Researcher, mentor, and cancer biologist

EVEN BEFORE Carey Jansen came to Emory from Athens, Georgia, she’d heard about how collegial this place was. But it wasn’t until she arrived and entered the MD/PhD program that she realized it’s deeply true—and an essential part of the Emory experience.

“Being able to work together with people from all over campus has presented opportunities to do some really unique and innovative things on the research and clinical sides,” she says. “Science and medicine are no longer individual sports. I think Emory is uniquely positioned to support a better future because we prize this teamwork and this collegiality.”

In addition to Jansen’s academic achievements, including winning the William and Catherine Rice Research Award for her work in cancer immunotherapies, she has also been rewarded by the experience of mentoring younger students. She says she’s just passing

on the welcome that was extended to her by professors, researchers, and clinicians at Emory who have always treated her like a future colleague rather than an underling.

“It results in a lot of really good working relationships that endure long beyond when we graduate and go our separate ways,” she says. For these efforts, she won the 2021 Emory Graduate Student Mentor Award.

This united front is important when battling a foe as pervasive and deadly as cancer. Jansen says it empowers everyone, from student to researcher to clinician, to drive advancements in cancer treatments and train future generations of doctors and scientists to combat this disease. “It’s no longer good enough to say the problem is too hard, we’ll leave it for later,” says Jansen. “We’re really pushing forward to try to solve it no matter how hard it might be. I think it’s really exciting for what it means to exist as a global community and as an Emory community.”—Tony Rehagen

DIVING DEEPER TO HELP MORE PEOPLE

EVERETT MOSS 23N

Firefighter, paramedic, and future nurse

EVERETT MOSS was a secondgeneration Atlanta firefighter as well as a paramedic. But he wanted to do more—and Emory was the key to that future. “As a first responder, your care stops at a certain level,” says Moss. “You can’t really follow the patient through the continuum of health care. So, leaving the fire service allowed me the opportunity to dive deeper and learn more when it comes to medical management of a variety of patient types.”

When it came time to choose the school where he would pursue that deeper health care knowledge through a career as a nurse anesthetist, the native-Atlantan Moss knew of Emory’s global reputation in the health care field. But it was actually the university’s personal relationships that sold him on his hometown school.

For instance, he met Kelly Wiltse Nicely, director of Emory’s CRNA program at a conference in Augusta, Georgia, and Moss was immediately struck by her compassion and support for each of her students. “I felt that they had a passion for the student outcomes,” says Moss. “They really cared about the students, their families, and their goals.”

Moss applied to Emory and was accepted in December 2019. But before starting class in fall 2020, Moss answered the call for help in the sudden wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He left to volunteer as an ICU nurse and code response team nurse at hospitals in hot spots in New York City and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

By the time he arrived at Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing in August 2020, after months of helping strangers through unprecedented times, Moss was glad to see the friendly faces of professor Nicely and the rest of the CRNA program at Emory.

“We have a small group of students per graduating cohort,” says Moss. “That’s real big for me because at larger programs with more students, it’s hard to have that interpersonal connection.”—Tony Rehagen

A DAY in the LIFE

of EMORY

photos by stephen nowland and kay hinton

From the break of dawn to well into the night, Emory’s campuses bustle with activity, as students, faculty, and staff go about their daily routines. Take a look at what life is like at Emory today through these captured moments of intense beauty, of focused work, of laughter shared with friends, and of higher learning.

7:50 a.M.—dawn’s eaRly liGht The rising sun illuminates a surge of activity on the Clifton Corridor, the key artery between Emory and its surrounding communities.

the liFe oF Megan Yang 19ox 22C

I’m a senior double majoring in psychology, as well as film and media studies. This fall, I’ve started my post-Emory job search and have been very active in a number of student organizations, all while getting through my classes for the rest of the semester. Here’s my typical busy day at Emory.

9:40 a.M.—Woke up and joined my first class from Zoom from the comfort of my apartment. 10:38 a.M.—I live off campus so I took a quick walk to the shuttle stop on Clairmont Campus. The shuttle drivers are so nice! 11:10 a.M.—Grabbed a brunch meal from student-favorite spot Kaldi’s Coffee at the student center. I ordered a hot matcha latte and the classic avocado toast. I was able to get some homework done for class, too. noon—My second class of the day is Film 403: The Biz with Dr. Nsenga Burton. We’re learning about diversity in the Hollywood industry. 1:00 p.M.— Tabled for my club at Wonderful Wednesday, a longstanding tradition at Emory for groups to engage with students. 2:17 p.M.—Just got out of my third class, Finance for Non-BBA’s. Today we learned how to measure risk and return in the market. 3:51 p.M.—Finished the fourth and final class of the day, MKT 341: Global Marketing Seminar with Dr. Jagdish Sheth. Today we got to hear from a classmate who owns a business and give him advice on how to grow the company. 5:08 p.M.—Decided to go on a run at the WoodPEC indoor track. It always feels good to get a workout in! 6:00 p.M.— Attended an info session about student programs at Ogilvy, which is my dream company.

7:30–9:00 p.M.—Met with members of the Model UN travel team to prepare for our upcoming conferences. 9:30 p.M.—Made it back home after a long day, ready to tackle class assignments and then get some sleep. “I take little moments to re-center throughout the day. We’re emotional critters and sometimes our emotions take us down the wrong path into our stress personality. I try to bring myself back to center so that I can feel good and make sure I’m giving my best personality to those around me. Emory’s Cognitively Based Compassion Training taught me to take stock of the moment and refocus my mental energy with compassion towards myself and others. It’s a reminder that the situation is usually better than our minds lead us to believe.”

Andrew Pendley 15B, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Emory University Hospital Medical Director

10:23 a.M.—stUdy tiMe Marketing student Taylor Ramaeckers 22B gets in a morning study session at Goizueta Business School.

8:46 a.M.—a MoMent oF MeditaTion Emergency physician and professor Andrew Pendley takes a brief pause from the daily stress of his work at Emory University Hospital.

9:19 a.M.—a RooF with a View The university’s canopy of trees shows off its autumn colors looking west from atop Emory University Hospital. 10:04 a.M.—bUsy bee Emory’s Education Gardens (this one next to Candler School of Theology) serve as living laboratories for students and faculty alike.

10:36 a.M.—neURal netwoRkinG Doctoral candidate Kate Hardin 25PhD (left) goes over some of her research with her adviser, professor James Zheng, in his neurobiology lab.

12:15 p.M.—GRoUp lUnCh Students take their pick from yummy, organic foods from the Farmer’s Market and dine outside on the Emory Student Center steps. 1:37 p.M.—GetTinG steaMy Long-time employee Frankie Parker helps run the Emory Steam Plant, making sure campus buildings stay warm.

the liFe oF Anya Kasubhai 22ox 24C

I’m a second-year Oxford College student from Tenafly, New Jersey, who plans to double major in anthropology and philosophy, politics, and law. I stay active on campus as the president of the Oxford Student Activities Committee (SAC), co-president of the Oxford Chorale, events chair for the South Asian Cultural Association, an Ignite mentor, and a Learning to Lead facilitator. 12:30 p.M. —Class got out a bit early today, so I grabbed lunch to go and sat with the SAC members at our table. I helped put everything away and then went to my room to go over the cases we were reviewing in my Criminal Justice class later this afternoon. 6:00 p.M. —I met up with one of my classmates for dinner to go over our setup plan for the Twilight event tonight. Since the event is pajama themed, I got changed after dinner and went to the student center to get ready for setup. 6:40 p.M.—Technical difficulties! We had to scramble to find a new location to show the movie, but it all worked out. We were even able to finish setting up for the event ten minutes early. I helped out at the food and drinks station for most of the event. 9:45 p.M.—After a successful event, we celebrated two SAC members’ birthdays. Cake!

7:30 a.M.—I finally woke up after hitting the snooze button on my alarm twice and got ready for the rest of the day. I then went over to Lil’s (the dining hall) to grab some breakfast, drink some tea, and get started on some schoolwork. 10:40 a.M.—I headed over to the Student Center and grabbed SAC decorations, a table, flyers, and Halloween candy to promote our Twilight event that night. 11:30 a.M. —I left the SAC table to go to my Global Black Feminist Politics class, which was being held outside on this beautiful day. We talked about Afro-Latin American feminist thought and how it connected to Black feminisms in America. 10:30 p.M.—Went back to my dorm room and hung out with my roommate, Hailey Hunt 220x 24C. We discussed our days and did a bit more homework before getting ready to go to bed.

11:30 p.M.—Lights out! I listened to some music to help me fall asleep before another busy day tomorrow.

11:51 a.M.—baRRe none Xavier Bell 22C balances his studies in neuroscience with a second major in dance, here practicing his moves in Mara Mandradjieff’s Level 3 Ballet class.

a day in

the liFe oF Deanna Altomara

20C 23ph

I’m an Emory alumna—I earned my undergraduate degree in creative writing and human health—and now I’m a first-year master’s student in the Department of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences at Rollins. I’m interested in the intersections of health communications, climate change, and infectious diseases.

7:03 a.M.—Woke up thirsty, wondering which tea should I drink. Probably chai—I needed the caffeine. Except I didn’t want to be too jittery for my History of Public Health presentation. 8:24 a.M.—I had some spare time before class, so I chilled at Lullwater with my friend the heron, which is always a good way to calm down.

9:22 a.M.—Caught in a sudden downpour. I had to frantically dry my hair in the bathroom (all paper towels successfully composted). 11:15 a.M.—Presentation time! The topic: reducing infant mortality. I love learning about how historical public health campaigns addressed issues like childhood nutrition and vaccination. It helps me to understand how we arrived at today’s challenges and how we can address them. 1:02 p.M.—Research Methods class today for three hours, and I’m already exhausted from this morning. Why doesn’t this school have nap pods? @gregfenves 3:01 p.M.—Team Rollin’ With It is about to ace this group project! We’ll be designing a quantitative study on social support and physical activity among older adults—as soon as we get some Kaldi’s. 4:50 p.M.—Me: *quietly working on my lit review outside Alabama Hall* Emory squirrel: *screams* 6:30 p.M.—Dinner in Decatur! Real question: Jeni’s or Butter and Cream for dessert? 10:15 p.M.—Did some unwinding in my apartment after a crazy but rewarding day. Excited to keep learning about this amazing field and work toward building a career telling impactful stories that educate people about disease and promote health equity. 10:46 p.M.—Time to recharge before jumping back into my busy week. Hot tip: Biostats textbooks are the ultimate sleeping aid.

2:47 p.M.—CaptiVe aUdienCe Assistant Professor Carl Suddler teaches Mass Incarceration beyond the New Jim Crow, an intensive seminar course for juniors and seniors.

3:09 p.M.—Fitness FoCUs Howard Hou 22C stays in shape by working out five days a week at the Clairmont Campus Fitness Center.

3:57 p.M.—GaMe FaCes Eagles soccer star Lily Dresner 21C and her teammates get pumped up for a home match at WoodPEC varsity field.

3:16 p.M.—peRFeCt spiRal A student descends the beautiful spiral staircase at Carlos Hall.

4:27 p.M.—GiVe Me a bReak The Depot by Kaldi’s Coffee is a favorite spot for students to catch up and unwind after a day full of classes.

4:53 p.M.—the GaMe’s aFooT An impromptu game of hacky sack kicks up outside Emory School of Medicine building.

6:19 p.M.—sUnset Glow Emory students parade by Asbury Circle just as the sun begins to set.

4:20 p.M.—silenCe is Golden The Matheson Reading Room in Candler Library is one of the quietest spots to study on campus.

the liFe oF Brian Goebel

I’m managing director of the Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute, an academic research center with a mission to transform business to build a more equitable and climate-smart world. I oversee the institute’s collection of innovative fieldwork programs and student activities that boost neighborhood vitality in Atlanta and beyond, as well as serve as a course instructor in nonprofit management and the Philanthropy Lab.

8:30 a.M.—I usually start my day with a cup of coffee, but today that coffee ritual was even more special as I joined nearly two hundred business students for coffee and conversation. It was a chilly day, but a perfect morning to team up with the Refuge Coffee Truck, a local social enterprise, to come to campus and celebrate all things social impact. 11:30 a.M.—I’m consistently wowed by the commitment Emory students have to making our Atlanta community stronger. For the first time in person this fall, I met with the Emory Impact Investing Group leadership team to hear more about their plans and how I can help assist in their mission of making more $5k to $10k loans to small businesses making a positive impact right here in Atlanta. noon—The Business & Society Institute hosted visiting Executives-in-Residence Sam Moss and David Kyle on campus. Sam and David advise our students on impact investing and other social impact career goals (and also are great mentors to me as well). We took advantage of the sunny weather to get MBA social enterprise students together with Sam and David for lunch filled with lively conversations about the role of business in society. 4:00 p.M.—After putting in some time on Zoom calls and email, I had a chance to close out my day on campus chatting again with Sam Moss. Sam and I gave two thumbs up to the new outdoor furniture now set up throughout the business school. Both proud members of the Georgia Social Impact Collaborative, we discussed some of the exciting work underway across Georgia focused on equitable economic development. 6:30 p.M.—Back home and looking forward to watching the Atlanta Braves in the 2021 World Series. Before the first pitch, I walked with my dog Mickey around my Kirkwood neighborhood. He picked the Braves to win in six games. Smart dog.

7:24 p.M.—sUpeR tRoUpeRs Students Elizabeth Peters 23Ox (left) and Makalee Cooper 23Ox (center) take center stage during a lively adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It outside and under the lights at Oxford College.

6:41 p.M. twiliGht tête-à-tête Eliana Kavouriadais 22B (left) and Castle Rossi 24C enjoy a chat on Alabama Lawn as the last glimmer of sunlight gives way to nightfall.

8:10 p.M.—niGhtTiMe stRoll The Connector Bridge over Eagle Row lights up the silhouettes of students headed toward the Whitehead Biomedical Research Building.

10:53 p.M.—keepinG it Clean Driver Johnny Davis takes out the soiled laundry at Emory University Hospital and delivers fresh linens.

TAKE A PEEK INSIDE THE LIVES and work of some of Emory’s top researchers— their motivations and passions, the struggles they overcame, and why they do what they do. From the physician investigating the differential effects of COVID-19 to the evolutionary biology student committed to rehabilitating the reputation of bats, Emory’s research enterprise is vast and diverse. Hundreds of students and faculty members are engaged in solving some of life’s most enduring and urgent problems. No one journey is alike. While some took the traditional route, others have zigged and zagged before landing on a research career. What they all share is the belief that their work will eventually better humanity.

OVERCOMING HEALTH DISPARITIES TO TREAT COVID-19

TREATING COVID Zanthia Wiley, associate professor of infectious diseases, examines a patient who is overcoming COVID-19.

Long before she became interested in science, Zanthia Wiley wanted to help others. For this physician and researcher who specializes in infectious diseases, science has never been about the lab. It’s always been about people. It’s a way to bridge the gap between current reality and her deep-rooted belief that everyone deserves to be treated equitably.

The only doctor in her family, Wiley was raised in a small town in Alabama by a single mom and grandparents who inspired in her an almost missionary zeal to look out for those around her. Not surprisingly, then, her first major research project during the COVID-19 pandemic centers on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on certain communities. Why, for instance, are underrepresented minorities dying at twice the rate of other groups?

“As a hospital-based, infectious diseases doctor, I became interested in the patients being admitted with COVID-19,” Wiley says. “What zip codes are they living in? What factors increase the likelihood of their contracting the virus? And which of these patients subsequently return to the hospital within a set period of time? My primary research now is trying to describe some of the factors that may increase the likelihood of Blacks and Hispanics contracting COVID-19 and the factors that contribute to their re-hospitalization.”

Wiley says she is working with more than thirty research colleagues from Emory hospitals, the VA, and Grady to address these disparities. “We range from medical students all the way up to full tenured professors from multiple specialties,” she says. “But we want this to be more than research within the four walls of our hospitals. We are looking at what we can do in our group and in the Emory community to meet people where they are.”

For instance, Wiley and her colleagues recognize that there are barriers—such as a lack of Internet access or transportation—for certain communities to come and receive the vaccine. “One of the things I think is really important is bringing the vaccine to the community,” she “WE ALL HAVE THE SAME GOAL: TO GET OUT OF THIS PANDEMIC AND TO PROVIDE THE BEST CARE THAT WE CAN TO EACH OTHER AND OUR PATIENTS.”

BY RAJEE SURI

SPOTLIGHT ON DISPARITIES COVID-19 has put the spotlight on health disparities of underserved communities, Wiley says.

says. “I think it’s great to have central vaccine sites, but I’m looking forward to the day we have mobile vaccine units at neighborhood hubs like churches, libraries, and community centers.”

Very early on during the pandemic, Wiley noticed that many of her patients looked just like her. “They look like my grandmother; they look like my aunt,” she says. “The disparities in COVID-19 are very personal for me. Fighting against this disease is equivalent to fighting for my family.”

And while COVID-19 has struck her own family, witnessing the tragedy and travesty of this on a daily basis has forever altered her perceptions as a researcher and physician.

“COVID-19 has truly magnified what I already knew was out there,” she says. “To see how this has ravaged our community and our world has been life changing. The structural issues, structural racism, and structural inequities are here.”

Wiley believes Emory has played an invaluable role in fostering this important research. “I feel like I’m appreciated, and I feel like my thoughts, opinions, and ideas are trusted,” she says. “I have veteran professors on my research team to help guide me through this process. And, on the other hand, I have medical students—young Black women who are able to witness and see my growth and what they can do, how they can contribute to clinical research. And we all have the same goal: to get out of this pandemic and to provide the best care that we can to each other and our patients.”

TACKLING THE PROBLEMS BEHIND MATERNAL MORTALITY

Alexis Dunn-Amore was three years old when she told her pregnant great-aunt to stop smoking. “I didn’t know how to read, but I knew that inhaling tobacco was bad for the baby,” she says. “It was maybe all the birth stories I had absorbed from my grandma, who had helped deliver many of her eighteen siblings.”

Dunn-Amore’s commitment to moms and babies has since found more far-reaching avenues. She is an assistant professor

DYNAMIC DUO Assistant professor Alexis Dunn-Amore (seated, right) serves as a mentor for nursing student Katiana Carey-Simms, who is pursuing a master’s degree.

of nursing, a certified nurse midwife who delivers babies at the Atlanta Birth Center, and a nurse-scientist who is trying to figure out why so many women in the US—especially Black women—are dying of complications from pregnancy or childbirth.

Her mentee, Katiana Carey-Simms 20N 22N, a master’s student in the nursing program, is a registered nurse and an aspiring midwife, and credits her adviser for many of her skills as a thinker and practitioner. A lesson Carey-Simms is placing great value on these days is how research and data can help transform policy and shift ground realities to benefit expectant moms most at risk of dying.

America’s maternal health outcomes are the worst in the developed world. It is the only developed country where the maternal death rate is rising. When a woman dies during pregnancy or within a year of childbirth, that’s typically considered a maternal death. Every year, seven hundred women die due to pregnancy, childbirth, or subsequent complications, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

An estimated additional fifty thousand women each year face severe consequences to their health as an outcome of pregnancy or labor. Black mothers die at three times the rate of white and Latina mothers, one of the widest racial disparities in women’s health.

Dunn-Amore and Carey-Simms say the reasons why so many Black women perish in the postpartum period range from poverty and a lack of health care access to untreated chronic conditions and mood disorders to systemic racism and bias. In Georgia, new or expecting mothers are estimated to be more than 50 percent likely to die than nationally within a year of giving birth.

BRIDGING RACIAL DIVIDES Black mothers die at three times the rate of white and Latina mothers, one of the widest racial disparities in women’s health.

Dunn-Amore’s interest in maternal mortality is personal. She nearly died after giving birth to her first child. Much of her research focuses on health disparities and the disproportionate toll it takes among expectant and new moms, many of whom look like her. She is currently building a web-based platform that uses a list of CDC indicators that typically precede maternal death so women can access information to help them triage their symptoms. Another research project she’s leading is exploring the relationships between gut health, inflammation, and postpartum depression. EVERY YEAR, SEVEN HUNDRED WOMEN DIE DUE TO PREGNANCY, CHILDBIRTH, OR SUBSEQUENT COMPLICATIONS, ACCORDING TO THE US CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION. “WE ARE LEVERAGING THE DIVERSITY OF GEORGIA TO TRY AND DISENTANGLE THE EFFECTS OF RACE FROM CLASS AND FROM GEOGRAPHY ON MORTALITY DISPARITIES.”

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS Assistant Professor Lauren McCullough researches why cancer outcomes for Black women are so disproportionately poor to their white counterparts.

MAPPING INEQUITIES IN BREAST CANCER OUTCOMES

Six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, breast cancer epidemiologist Lauren McCullough felt like she was hanging by a thread. Like many working moms during this crisis, she was balancing an exhausting workload—teaching, researching, writing, mentoring her graduate students—while at home schooling two elementary school children and nursing and caring for her infant. So one afternoon, when her boys begged her to join them outside in play, she pushed aside thoughts of looming deadlines and embraced the moment to put back the fun in her work. Armed with sidewalk chalk, she soon turned a game of sketch on the street into a conceptual model for a new grant.

ADVOCACY MATTERS Driving more attention and funding to researching health care disparities is critical, McCullough says.

“My research framework was literally street art—it did leave some of our neighbors scratching their heads,” she laughs.

Once a competitive baton twirler, choreographer, and dancer, McCullough says she often finds herself using skills from her artistic past in her scientific present. “A lot of the creativity that I used, especially as a choreographer—seeing the end before the beginning and being able to space people across time—has really helped me in how I think about the research problem: strategically and creatively.”

An assistant professor at Rollins School of Public Health, McCullough knew her calling early on. She was a sophomore in college when her father was diagnosed with advanced-stage lung cancer. Watching him navigate that complicated medical journey made her pivot from a career in medicine to a future in epidemiology.

As she was going through the diagnosis with him, she says she wondered, “Well, what about the social factors? What about the fact that my dad doesn’t feel comfortable with his oncologist, so he’s refusing everything? What about all these other things that are not biology, not physics, not chemistry?”

Those questions now lie at the heart of McCullough’s work: She is investigating why outcomes for Black women with breast cancer are so much worse than their white counterparts despite socioeconomic status and other seemingly favorable characteristics.

McCullough is conducting a county-level mapping exercise in Georgia to understand the landscape of breast cancer disparities and spotlight urban and rural areas that can benefit from better resources for care. “We are leveraging the diversity of Georgia to try and disentangle the effects of race from class and from geography on mortality disparities,” she says.

Nationally, Black women are 40 percent more likely than their white counterparts to die of breast cancer, but in metro Atlanta, Black women are twice as likely to die of breast cancer, McCullough says. Through their research, she and her colleagues discovered that Black women have disproportionately poor outcomes despite possessing what are considered good indicators for cancer patients—usually a hormonally responsive tumor that is treatable. Racial gaps persist even when women receive initial therapy consistent with cancer guidelines, she says. And Black women who live in better neighborhoods, are highly educated, have insurance as well as access to health care, and have an above-average income do much worse than white women with a similar background.

Her initial work on breast cancer disparities was piloted through funds from Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute in 2018 and later received funding from the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the National Cancer Institute to expand the surveillance work across the state.

McCullough says that Emory students play an integral role in her research. “Being able to take them out into the community and showing them why what they do matters, that excites me most,” she notes. “I am not going to figure out disparities in my time, so I want to ensure that there remain people who are passionate enough to see this research through.”

SACRED WORK Jesse P. Karlsberg, senior digital scholarship strategist and associated faculty member of music, is working to expand and digitize a sacred songbook library.

HARNESSING THE POWER OF SONG TO HEAL DIVIDES

What can a buried trove of overlooked and sacred songbooks from a century ago tell us about how people navigated race, religion, and place—and can it help reconstruct our national conversation about those topics now?

It’s an ambitious question and one among many that Emory music faculty member Jesse P. Karlsberg 13G 15PhD hopes to answer as he expands the digital footprint of Sounding Spirit, a one-of-a-kind, historic sacred songbook library that he first developed as a doctoral student here. The books in the online collection encompass a host of musical genres: spirituals, gospel, hymns, and shape note singing.

Many of the songs offer glimpses into the roots of America’s current racial dynamics, speckled with sentiments ranging from white supremacy to the longing to be free to the lure of home. What most intrigues Karlsberg is how this music encouraged people to cross boundaries that were typically taboo and the lessons it holds for us today.

“Transport yourself back to West Georgia in the 1850s. These songs were in the air, sung in the fields, in churches,” he says. “While they were created under oppressive conditions, they wove a shared cultural fabric that extended across racial lines. Sounding Spirit is an invitation to mine these texts for the ways diverse peoples and communities made meaning together, whether through conflict, expropriation, or collaboration.”

A renewed infusion of funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities will enable Karlsberg and a multi-institution team to untangle this unique and intricate slice of American history while adding more than 1,250 books of sacred music, published between 1850 and 1925, to the digital library.

Based at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the project offers Karlsberg an opportunity to marry his two loves: history and collecting. As a child in Boston, he spent summers gathering up sand dollars, progress- “SOUNDING SPIRIT ing to bottle caps, stamps, and old music books as he grew older. IS AN INVITATION TO

Now a scholar of American music MINE THESE TEXTS FOR and a Sacred Harp singer, Karlsberg THE WAYS DIVERSE says the books they are archiving were once printed in the hundreds of thouPEOPLES AND COMMUsands but are rare to find in libraries NITIES MADE MEANING these days. “Even though this music TOGETHER.” was taking place in the backyards of many educational institutions, it just wasn’t on the radar of scholars.

By creating a forever home for these songbooks, Karlsberg says the digital library is taking the first step towards telling a more inclusive and more complicated story of American music and sacred music. “In prioritizing works to include in the digital library, we’ve done our best to rectify imbalances in historical collecting efforts by institutions across the country,” he says. “Works will include those edited by or containing music sung by Black people, authored by women, and in a range of languages.”

While Sounding Spirit’s contribution to understanding history is important, Karlsberg says the project will also gain significance for harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to enable more sophisticated optical music recognition. Researchers from computer science and natural language processing will partner with historians and musicologists and use these new technologies to obtain textual and musical information from songbook page images.

“How do you know when you have a bunch of blocks of text on a page what order they come in? Well, that’s a simple problem for a singer, but quite a difficult challenge to do automatically,” says Karlsberg. “But AI has opened up new, exciting strategies for extracting this information. This project will enable us to improve existing methods and develop new approaches in that space and share our learnings widely.”

The discovery of lead contamination in Atlanta’s mostly poor, largely Black, Westside neighborhood began innocuously. Two years ago, Emory environmental science professor Eri Saikawa, who wanted to help her then-graduate student find a thesis topic, suggested looking at soil samples in a community where urban agriculture was proliferating.

What Saikawa and her student found in Atlanta’s Westside was “shocking and heartbreaking.” The lead levels in the soil were unacceptable enough for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to classify more than one thousand properties in the community as a Superfund site, which means the EPA will take responsibility for cleaning it up, an undertaking that can run into millions of dollars.

Without Saikawa and her research team, the community may never have known that their playgrounds, backyards, and gardens contained hazardous waste from bygone smelters, and they may never have been able to build a case for the Superfund designation. Without the Westside project, Saikawa says she may never have made the leap from environmental researcher to community scientist.

When she began the project, Saikawa’s expertise was in greenhouse gas emissions and air-quality modeling. Her first foray into field research began in a small village in Tibet where she and her team were researching

GETTING THE LEAD OUT (OF household air pollution. Under pristine blue skies, OUR SOIL) TO she found women burning yak dung inside their tents. “Very hazardous air is about 500 mcg per PROTECT FUTURE cubic meter,” Saikawa says. “When we measured the GENERATIONS particulate concentration matter inside the tent, it was 150,000 mcg per cubic meter. I couldn’t even see the person standing in front of me—the smoke was that dense.” She thought the women would be outraged and want to fix the problem once they realized how dangerous it was to their health. Instead, they told her that exposure to the toxic air bothered them less than the melting glaciers in their community. The encounter made Saikawa rethink conventional ways of solving climate change. “We cannot really talk about climate change in a constructive way because it becomes somehow normative—we should do this, we should do that. We need to understand what we value and why we value it. That may be one way to find a better solution.” Like many researchers around the world, Saikawa had to adapt to the new normal of the pandemic to continue her research in the Westside. For instance, her partnership with the community had to change from going door-to-door to collect soil samples to creating a soil drop box for residents.

FIELD WORKER Eri Saikawa, professor of environmental science, employs field research to study ways to improve air and soil quality.

“We were able to collect about three hundred soil samples, and that was the biggest number ever collected,” Saikawa says. “It opened up a new way to engage the residents too.”

That model has gained so much credibility and acceptance that Louisiana state public health officials wrote to Saikawa that they want to replicate it in New Orleans. Gratified that the authorities are acting decisively to clean up toxic sites, Saikawa says her work in the community will continue as long as they require her services, especially because there is no safe level of lead exposure for children.

While it’s hard to get Saikawa to talk about herself, her reticence disappears when the topic shifts to her students. She took one group to witness the historic climate talks that led to the Paris Agreement. Her research team comprises undergraduate and graduate students from multiple fields, including the humanities. “Emory offers opportunities for interdisciplinary research to students of all ages and academic backgrounds,” she says. “That is something I never thought about before I came here, and now I treasure it.” “WE CANNOT REALLY TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE IN A CONSTRUCTIVE WAY BECAUSE IT BECOMES SOMEWHAT NORMATIVE. . . . WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE VALUE AND WHY WE VALUE IT.”

WINGED INSPIRATION Doctoral student Amanda Vicente-Santos says we can learn a lot about human diseases by studying bats.

DEMYSTIFYING BATS WHILE LOOKING FOR WAYS TO PREVENT THE NEXT PANDEMIC

The next pandemic could be averted if we better understand why viruses spill over from wildlife to humans. Emory researcher Amanda VicenteSantos 24PhD is looking at bats for answers.

Vicente-Santos knew her calling even before she could name it. Growing up in a small Costa Rican port town, she had her pick of the Pacific Ocean and rainforest as playgrounds. She swam in waters with humpback whales and bottlenose dolphins and learned to blend in with an astonishing array of birds and animals in the jungle that towered behind her home. So her pursuit of a future in ecology came as no surprise. Less expected was “I AM TRYING TO how vital her area of research UNDERSTAND HOW would become because of COVID-19. HUMANS ARE CHANGING

A doctoral candidate THE RULES OF NATURE, at Emory’s Laney Graduate FORCING ANIMALS TO School, Vicente-Santos is a ADAPT TO THESE CHANGES, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR OWN HEALTH.”

IN THE WILD Research trips to Costa Rica led by Vicente-Santos help stimulate Emory students’ interest in natural sciences.

disease ecologist studying the immune systems of bats. Bats inevitably figure in the discussion of any disease outbreak, and COVID-19 is no exception, with some researchers pointing to the world’s only flying mammal as the origin species for the virus. While that theory continues to persist, Vicente-Santos is examining the other side of that equation: Understanding the impact of people on bats and how their immune systems respond to human incursion on their homes. She is looking at stress markers on cave-dwelling bats in Costa Rica that will help predict a “spillover” event—the moment when a pathogen jumps from one species to another, eventually ending up in a person who can then infect others.

“I am trying to understand how humans are changing the rules of nature, forcing animals to adapt to these changes, and what it means for our own health,” Vicente-Santos says.

Bats make for perfect study animals because they are not confined to one region, she adds. “They exist in such diverse environments, which presents a great opportunity to assess how our encroachment into wildlife refuges is hurting them and us.”

Vicente-Santos is particularly in awe of the immune system of bats, especially how it has evolved to help them fly. Bats can also live up to forty years in the wild, unusually long for such small mammals.

Vicente-Santos says she chose Emory because she found the ideal adviser—associate professor of environmental sciences Thomas Gillespie—an expert on zoonotic diseases recognized for his integrative approach to the conservation of biodiversity and mitigation of emerging infectious diseases. Gillespie was among the first scientists to demonstrate that human impact on the environment can alter the dynamics of natural pathogens in wildlife and create opportunities for pathogens to jump between species. Vicente-Santos’s doctoral work has been a centerpiece of applying this “One Health” approach in her native Costa Rica.

Gillespie says Vicente-Santos’s dissertation addresses a critical gap in our understanding of how human disturbance of ecosystems alters disease risk. “We desperately need well-designed empirical studies that integrate animal health surveillance complemented by detailed ecological data on natural and anthropogenic systems, and that is the core of Amanda’s research thesis,” he says.

Vicente-Santos came to Atlanta as a Fulbright scholar and when that funding ended, Emory stepped in to provide financial assistance. Emory is among the top institutions for the number of research training grants awarded to students, and Vicente-Santos has put her grant-writing training to good use by winning a slew of small awards.

She is paying it forward: she has taken small groups of undergraduate female Emory students on research trips to Costa Rica to stimulate interest in science and upend myths about bats. Vicente-Santos says while research in Costa Rica is under-resourced, it remains a budding scientist’s dream environment. “The forest and the ocean are living research laboratories and something you cannot build,” she says.