Yoh Pick for Trustee Chairman

Alumnus Harold L. "Spike" Yoh Jr. will become chairman of the Duke University Board of Trustees, and a former Duke administrator and a medical researcher have been elected to the board, university officials announced Tuesday.

Paula Phillips Burger of Baltimore and Dr. James Raphael Gavin III of Chevy Chase, Md., have been elected to their first terms as members of the 37-person board. Their terms become effective July 1.

Yoh, who has served as vice chairman of Duke's Board of Trustees for the past three years, will become the board's new chair on July 1. He succeeds Randall L. Tobias, who has served as board chair since July 1, 1997. Tobias has been a trustee since 1986, and will retire from the board June 30.

"Spike is the right person to lead this board," said Tobias, chairman emeritus of Eli Lilly and Co. "He is an outstanding leader and has a great understanding of the challenges that the university faces as well as the opportunities that exist."

Yoh said he looks forward to working with the other trustees "to help Duke build on its excellence and to anticipate change in the future. The world is rapidly evolving. Breakthroughs in research, medicine, global communications and other fields make this is a very exciting time for higher education in general, and for Duke in particular."

Succeeding Yoh as vice chairs of the board are Peter M. Nicholas, co-chairman, president and chief executive officer of Boston Scientific Corp., Watertown, Mass., who has been a trustee since 1993, and Robert K. Steel, managing director of Goldman Sachs & Co. and chairman of the board of directors of the Duke University Management Co. He has been a trustee since 1996.

Burger has been vice provost for academic affairs and international programs at Johns Hopkins University since 1993. Prior to that, she was vice provost for academic services (1986-92), then executive vice provost (1992-93) at Duke. From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, she worked at the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development, ultimately serving as assistant secretary for policy coordination.

Burger graduated from Duke with a bachelor of arts in political science in 1967, and earned her master's in political science from Duke in 1974. From 1970 to 1972, she served as the dean of women at the Woman's College at Duke ‚ the men's and women's colleges merged in 1972. She also served as assistant dean of Duke's Trinity College of Arts and Sciences from 1972 to 1974. After earning her Ph.D. in public law and the judicial process from Johns Hopkins in 1984, she was an adjunct faculty member in Duke's political science department from 1986 to 1993, teaching such topics as the federal bureaucracy and the politics of regulation.

Burger, who received the Duke University Award for Merit in 1989, has served on the board of directors of Duke's alumni association, The Women's Center at Duke and the American Schools of Oriental Research, on the Council on Women's Studies at Duke, on the planning board of the Maryland Network for Women Leaders in Higher Education and on the executive committee of the Duke Annual Fund.

Gavin has been a senior scientific officer for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase since 1991. He is a past president of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), a national program director and trustee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, was voted "Internist of the Year" by the National Medical Association in 1997, and was named "Outstanding Clinician in the Field of Diabetes" by the ADA in 1990. Before joining the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he was the William K. Warren professor of diabetes studies at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, chief of the health center's diabetes division, and acting chief of the health center's endocrinology, metabolism and hypertension section.

He earned a bachelor of science degree from Livingstone College in Salisbury in 1966; a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Emory University in Atlanta in 1970; and a medical degree from Duke in 1975.

In 1998, he was inducted into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame, and in 1999 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Duke University School of Medicine and the President's Leadership Achievement Award from the Livingstone College Alumni Association. In addition, he is an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, a branch of the military.

Yoh retired last year as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Day & Zimmermann Inc., a billion- dollar sales diversified international professional service firm now managed by his children in Philadelphia.

Yoh graduated in 1958 from Duke's School of Engineering and his wife, Mary, graduated from Duke's Woman's College in 1959. The Yohs and their five children and a daughter-in-law collectively have earned nine degrees from Duke. Yoh, first elected to the Board of Trustees in 1991, holds a number of awards from the university, including the Charles A. Dukes Award for Outstanding Service to the university (1996), the Blue Devil Award (1986) and the Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award (1983).