News

When Nhu-y Phan, MD, became the first member of her family to complete college and then medical school, she felt a range of emotions. Feelings of pride, gratitude, and accomplishment mixed with a sense of responsibility to provide care to her local Vietnamese community, as well as fear stemming from the challenges of providing compassionate, holistic care to these populations. 

Members of the Duke Neurology Department shared their advances and insights in neurology education, health disparities, movement disorders, and other areas at the American Academy of Neurology’s (AAN) 75th annual meeting in Boston this week. This year, our faculty, staff, and trainees contributed more to the AAN than in any previous year, contributing to 20 posters and abstracts and six classes or sessions.

As part of the ongoing partnership with Duke University and North Carolina Central University, Duke will host Neurosciences Career Exploration Day for NCCU students, a new event co-sponsored by the Duke-NCCU Bridge Office.

The Duke Neurology Department has released its selections for its residency class of 2027. Our next class of residents will consist of:

Members of the Duke Neurology Department got the new year off to a fast start this January, contributing to 10 new peer-reviewed journal articles. Rick Bedlack, MD, PhD, was the senior author of three new publications investigating potential new therapies for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

For as long as she can remember, Jamila Minga, PhD, CCC-SLP, has been something of a contrarian. “If most people are going left, I have a tendency to go right,” she says. So when as a graduate student she found that most research on stroke rehabilitation had ignored how damage to the right side of the brain affected language and communication, she saw an opportunity. After earning her doctorate on the subject, she’s a leading expert in the topic.

The Duke Neurology Department continued to build on its success in the second half of 2022. The final six months of 2022 saw Duke University Hospital receive national rankings for neurology and neurosurgery, our first endowed professorship dedicated to help treat and understand amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and recognition as the country’s second national center of excellence for dystonia among other achievements.

The Duke Neurology Department continued to grow and advance its missions of patient care, research, and training the next generation of neurology providers in 2022. Highlights from the first half of our calendar year include national and Duke-wide awards recognizing our faculty’s contributions to the field of diversity, inclusion, and neurology as a whole. The same period also saw the growth of the new Duke/UNC Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and three of our neurologists don helmets and get in their racing care.

This October, members of the Duke Neurology Department advanced the fields of clinical and translational neuroscience, contributing to 14 new peer-reviewed studies and one book chapter. Highlights from our recent research include validation of new automated measures that evaluate handwriting for dystonia symptoms, a discussion of the effects of blood pressure on head and facial pain, and a discussion of presentations of a neuroimmune disorder known as MOGAD.

Members of the Duke Neurology Department contributed to 12 new peer-reviewed journal articles published this September. Among other findings, this research answered important questions about the use of telehealth to manage chronic neurological conditions, investigated an alternative therapy’s potential benefit for fighting ALS, and synthesized the latest research findings about the role of the immune system and infection in the genesis of Alzheimer’s disease.