A Decade of Student Stories
A small sampling of Duke students' remarkable stories since 2010
Shandiin Herrera: A STUDENT PRAISED FOR BUILDING SUPPORT FOR NATIVE AMERICANS ON CAMPUS
Shandiin Herrera graduated from Duke as the university's first Native American Udall Scholar and as a campus leader who has advocated for more institutional support for Native students. Herrera helped members of the Native American Duke community better connect and make their presence known on campus.
MATT ALSTON: CODING AND RESEARCH WITH AN EYE TOWARD SILICON VALLEY
A Reginaldo Howard Scholar, Matt Alston developed an interest in working in tech through internships both as a growth analyst for a Silicon Valley startup and as a business software engineer for Goldman Sachs. Also a Howard Hughes Summer Research Fellow, he was placed in Warren Grill’s biomedical engineering lab where he had his first experience as a coder. From this experience, Alston became excited about the problem-solving nature of programming.
BRITTANY WENGER: DUKE STUDENT LIGHTS WHITE HOUSE CHRISTMAS TREE WITH CODE
In 2012, Brittany Wenger won the 2nd Annual Google Science Fair for her work in developing an application to help doctors diagnose breast cancer. Two years later, she attended The White House Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony as an A.B. Duke Scholar, using code to light the tree as part of the event.
Shelly Li and Arun Karottu: DUKE STUDENts Change Face of E-Waste Recycling
As sophomores at Duke, Shelly Li and Arun Karottu observed discarded end-of-life electronics in the dumpster and decided to intervene. The pair went from being friends to co-founders of a multi-million dollar company, Smart Metals Recycling. By collecting reusable metals and plastics from undesired electronics and sourcing them back to producers, Li and Karottu are becoming important figures in e-waste recycling.
Lucinda Camras: Scientist and Entrepreneur
Lucinda Camras began working in a glaucoma research lab at 16, designed a new glaucoma therapy with her father as a sophomore at Northwestern, cofounded a startup based on that idea during her first year as a Ph.D. student at Duke and now works as the company’s chief scientific officer.
Roy Auh: Revealing Voices
August 2018 in Beijing, Roy Auh had the opportunity to present a paper about Project Vox at the 24th World Congress of Philosophy. Project Vox concerns an important, relatively recent, scholarly development in philosophy: the acknowledgement that a number of early modern women have been unjustly ignored in our narratives of the history of philosophy. In 2014 a project team formed to build a website that could help support the incorporation of non-canonical philosophers into research and teaching, and they launched the Project Vox website in March 2015.