Duke University & Durham

Durham, located in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, is a modern cosmopolitan area of roughly 200,000 people. Together with Raleigh, home of North Carolina State University, and Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Durham is one corner of the Research Triangle, an extraordinary business development that is home to hundreds of small and large high technology companies, including such companies as GlaxoSmithKline, IBM, Bayer, Nortel, Dupont, BASF and Verizon, as well as major government laboratories for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Piedmont region of North Carolina consists of gently rolling hills and pine forests. The climate is temperate, with exceptionally long and beautiful transitional seasons (Spring and Fall). The Triangle is convenient to much of the striking physical beauty of North Carolina, including several National Seashore areas and the Great Smokey Mountains National Park (http://www.visitnc.com/index_home.asp).

Duke University is a major private research University located in Durham, North Carolina. Duke University currently enrolls roughly 6,500 undergraduate and 4,500 graduate and professional students in the Schools of Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Engineering, Business, Law and Public Policy. The Duke University campus is unique in its construction: although the Medical Center and University occupy more or less distinct loci, the two segments are contiguous, a physical layout highly conducive to interaction.

Duke University and the Duke University Medical Center provide an outstanding set of capabilities that facilitate the study of chemistry in the context of biology. The NMR center at Duke provides access to numerous instruments to 800 MHz (1H) in both the Department of Chemistry (300, 400 MHz) and the LSRC (300, 500, 600 800 MHz). Mass spectrometry resources at Duke include an AB 4700 MALDI TOF/TOF for automated peptide fragmentation and mass fingerprinting, an ABI Q-Star with nanospray ionization, an ABI Biospectrometry Workstation (MALDI-MS), an Agilent LC/MS ion-trap MS system, a JEOL SX-102 HR-MS, an HP-5988A GC/MS, two Micromass/Waters Quattro-LC triple quadrupolar mass spectrometers, both equipped with double orthogonal electrospray ionization sources and autosamplers and a Micromass/Waters Quattro-Micro triple quadrupolar mass spectrometer equipped with a double orthogonal electrospray ionization source and autosampler. Several other core facilities on campus provide services and capabilities important to the proposed training, including DNA synthesis and sequencing facilities, a peptide synthesis facility, cell culture and large-scale fermentation facilities, a flow cytometry facility, macromolecular structure determination and graphics facilities (including a 3D visualization room), a microscopy facility, and monoclonal antibody facilities. Additional capabilities are currently under development as part of the Duke Integrated Genome Sciences Program, a $250M initiative headed by Huntington Willard. Already, the IGSP center offers extensive transgenic animal facilities, including those housed in the newly constructed Animal Models of Human Diseases building. Additional capabilities of importance to the training proposed here will be developed through the other participating centers of the IGSP, most notably the Genome Technologies Center.

Myriad computational resources exist both on campus and in Duke-affiliated Triangle resources. The participating Departments all run various Windows and UNIX-based servers and clusters, many of which are linked by fiber-optic connection to the North Carolina Supercomputer Center. The participating Departments have various projection and visualization facilities for exploration of macromolecular structures, including a recently constructed 3D visualization facility.

The libraries of Duke University consist of the William R. Perkins Library and its seven branches on campus: Biological and Environmental Sciences, Chemistry, Lilly, Engineering, Music, Mathematics-Physics, Special Collections; the Pearse Memorial Library at the Duke Marine Laboratory in Beaufort; and the independently administered libraries of Divinity, Law, Medicine, and Business (Ford Library). As of June 2002, these libraries contained over 5,234,000 volumes and received some 37,000 serials. An extensive collection of nearly 18,000 online journals is available to researchers across campus. The significant holdings of Duke University are further augmented by the libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University through the Triangle Research Library Network (TRLN), which provides online access to catalogued collections and rapid volume and article delivery services.

Together, Duke and Durham provide an outstanding environment in which to live and work. We hope to see you here soon!