Summer 2008: Of Note
Perfect Pitch
Emory in the news
- Passion for justice: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution featured the activist work of Emory student (and Emory EMT) Danielle Smith 09C, president of Emory’s “Paperclips for Peace” Darfur awareness and aid group.
- Obesity obligation: Emory Global Health Vice President Jeffrey Koplan was front and center in a series of articles in the Washington Post critiquing the federal government’s efforts to reduce childhood obesity. “The sense of this as a national health priority just doesn’t come through. This probably will contribute more to our health care bill than anything else over the next fifty years,” Koplan said.
- “The church was the one institution black people always owned, a refuge where we were empowered to speak our minds,” Candler School of Theology professor Noel L. Erskine told ABC News in the wake of the firestorm over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s comments and his connections to Senator Barack Obama. Teresa Fry Brown, director of Candler’s Black Church Studies program, also provided insight to USA Today and the Christian Science Monitor, explaining that, “how people hear something depends on their own experience and worldview.”
- Give me shelter: Emory law professor Frank Alexander discussed murky foreclosure laws in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “When it is time for foreclosure, it’s only fair and just that the homeowner know the identity of the forecloser.”
- Electing health: With health care a key election issue, national policy expert Kenneth Thorpe, chair of health policy and management at Rollins School of Public Health, has been featured extensively by Vermont and West Virginia media as the architect of new health care systems for those states. Thorpe said in the Dayton Daily News that “we’re sending the wrong financial signals,” with a fee structure that pays billions to care for the effects of diabetes but little for prevention.
- Pamela Scully, director of the Institute of African Studies, was interviewed live on CNN International in May and CNN’s Inside Africa in June about the politics and history behind ongoing violence in South Africa.
- Good genes: Emory psychiatrists Rebekah Bradley and Kerry Ressler’s work on a gene that can protect the brain from the lifelong effects of emotional trauma in childhood was noted in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, ABC News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Houston Chronicle, and international wire service stories.
Bryan Meltz