Tulane University Athletics inducted five new honorees into the 2019 Hall of Fame Class. Those inducted were the baseball program’s all-time saves leader Daniel Latham; two-time all-American women’s golfer Maribel Lopez Porras; all-American football player Ed Mikkelsen; two-time all-conference women’s basketball star Gwen Slaughter; and longtime Tulane team physician Greg Stewart. The Billy Slatten Award was presented to Times-Picayune and States-Item columnist Angus Lind.

The Décou-Labat Residences, formerly Willow Residences, were dedicated on Nov. 16 on the uptown campus. The residences are named in honor of Deidre Dumas Labat (NC ’66, G ’69) and Reynold T. Décou (A&S ’67, A&S ’79), the first African American undergraduates to earn degrees from Newcomb and Tulane, respectively. (See “Pioneers on Campus,” Tulanian, September 2019.) The naming of the residences is part of the Tulane Trailblazers initiative.

Francisco Estrada-Belli, a research assistant professor in the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane, was part of a team of researchers who uncovered evidence that suggests extreme and violent warfare, along with a massive fire, led to the destruction of the Maya city Witzna nearly 1,500 years ago, in what is now northern Guatemala.

A team of Tulane researchers —James McLachlan, associate professor of microbiology and immunology, John McLachlan, Weatherhead Professor of Pharmacology, and Franck Mauvais-Jarvis, Price-Goldsmith Professor of Nutrition — will study how sex differences shape disparate immune responses in men and women.

Researchers from Tulane School of Medicine authored a study in the Journal of Cell Biology that suggests some cancer cells survive chemotherapy by eating their neighboring tumor cells. The study suggests the act of cannibalism provides the treated cancer cells with energy to stay alive and initiate tumor relapse after the course of treatment is complete.

The Newcomb Archives and the Nadine Robbert Vorhoff Collection of the Newcomb Institute are now accessible through a Digital Repository online. In addition, the Newcomb Art Museum will inventory and digitize its permanent collections with a Collection Stewardship grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services Museums for America.

“What’s happening now is that the Chinese system is changing the nature of the internet.”WALTER ISAACSON, history professor at Tulane, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” regarding the relationship between the Chinese government and CEOs of American businesses like Apple and Facebook.

The Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking celebrated its five-year anniversary in November. The center aims to support students as they identify their changemaking path through programs in teaching, research and practices of design thinking, social entrepreneurship and social innovation. The center was founded in 2014 with a $15 million contribution from Taylor and the Patrick F. Taylor Foundation.

Douglas Harris, director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and chair of the Department of Economics at Tulane, discussed on NPR his research on failing charter schools closing in New Orleans. “If you’re doing [closures and takeovers] well, then those opening schools are better than the ones that you’re closing and taking over. That’s going to lead to improvement in the city — and it did.”

“... the stereotype is that the environment is about tree hugging or saving exotic birds.” 
THOMAS LAVEIST, dean of Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in Bloomberg Environment on why he thinks black politicians haven’t focused much on climate change.