Late last month, I marked a full 10 years since I started my job as communications director for the Duke Department of Medicine. It’s been a fabulous job, and I feel fortunate to have been given this challenging, rewarding work. Together with my colleague, Elizabeth McCamic, we built a responsive and adaptive communications strategy and set of tools—a sprawling website, the MedicineNews portal, and the This Week in Medicine e-newsletter, among others—to reflect the mission and activities of one of the top internal medicine departments in the country.
When I started in 2010, there were only a few other communicators in the School of Medicine. Today, there is a network of dozens of communicators across the 25 departments and 12 institutes. There have been many opportunities to help recruit, mentor, partner, and celebrate these colleagues over this decade, and every day I’m inspired by their talents and work, which you can see flowing through the Duke River of News.
As I mentioned in my birthday post, one of my work projects, Voices of Duke Health, received an honorable mention in the GIA Awards for Excellence. The Association of American Medical Colleges hosted an online awards ceremony last week and posted the award winners. I was proud to represent Duke University, and the winning projects got me thinking about new ways to do our work here even better.
© Anton Zuiker