Standing and Delivering
One of the most rewarding experiences of the RF program has been the seminars put on by distinguished faculty. The series started off with a resounding success in the form of Dr. Philip Benfey. As Chair of the Biology Department, Dr. Benfey leads a lab that investigates the mechanisms by which plant cells choose their identity, specifically in the root tip. but the most interesting part of his spiel was his life story. Dr. Benfey has literally been around the block. After spending time in the rugged Mountain West as a teenager, he traveled to the Philipines and lived in Japan before settling down in France. There he earned an undergradutate degree in biology and was accepted to a host of top schools, finally earning his Ph.D from Harvard. He spoke with such eloquence that one couldn't help but be fascinated by his description of systems biology and the use of mathematics in biology. I could go on and on about Dr. Benfey, but he was only the start of a line of professors that took the time to teach a classroom-full of undergrads about themselves and their research. Dr. Mohamed Noor, winner of the Darwin Medal awarded by the Royal Society every fifty years, Dr. David Sherwood and Dr. Steve Haase are just a few of the other speakers who come to my mind as great mentors and communicators. They opened my eyes to fields of biology I had never heard of and, without sounding too naive, gave me hope that scientific progress made at Duke would contribute to curing some of the world's most fatal diseases and saving millions of lives.
