When Sabhyata Jha was a teenager, a catastrophic earthquake devastated parts of her native Nepal. The April 15, 2015, Gorkha quake killed almost 9,000 people and damaged or destroyed more than 600,000 structures. Jha, now a data science major at Duke Kunshan University, was lucky, she says. Her family survived and their house remained standing. Still, hundreds of aftershocks – some lethally powerful – disrupted her 10th grade year and changed thousands of lives throughout her Himalayan ho...| Duke Mag
Stroke patients with damage to the right side of their brains don’t ask a lot of yes-no questions. Although they commonly retain their command of language, people with right hemisphere damage (RHD) have trouble processing the information and assumptions that go into crafting such “polar questions.”| Duke Mag
If Leonard White shows you around the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, there’s a good chance he will hand you an actual brain. It weighs about three pounds, but unlike the squishy one in your skull, brains preserved for study feel rubbery. And visitors love to hold them. “They respond with wonder, with excitement, with maybe a bit of nervousness, but with amazing curiosity,” says White. “And it’s a very rewarding experience for my guests, as well as for myself.”| Duke Mag
William Wetsel gives psychedelic drugs and other chemicals to mice because he’s trying to solve the enormous human problems of anxiety, depression and addiction. “The task that we have is to try to develop drugs that will have long-lasting antidepressant, anxiolytic [anti-anxiety] and anti-drug-abuse effects,” he says. Wetsel is associate professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Mouse Behavioral and Neuroendocrine Analysis Core Facility at Duke.| Duke Mag
Jonathan Viventi, assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering, works on improving devices implanted in the brain to address problems such as epilepsy. “My group develops new electrode arrays for interfacing with the brain at higher resolution,” he says, “while having broad coverage and high-density sampling,” giving scientists enormous amounts of information readable from brain signals.| Duke Mag
