EMORY + THE CARTER CENTER
celebrate
40 years of partnership

Emory faculty, alumni, staff and students contribute to Carter Center fieldwork, with students providing the largest cohort of interns for the center. And Carter Center experts are Emory adjunct professors, aiding faculty research and bringing their expertise in international affairs, conflict resolution, public health and more into the classroom. 

Sharing their time and expertise generously, Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter have touched nearly every facet of university life, including establishing a town hall tradition for Emory first-year students that is a magical, “where else but here?” event.

Just weeks into their first semester, every year Emory students had the unprecedented opportunity to hear from this incomparable naval lieutenant, peanut farmer, governor of Georgia, downhill skier (a skill learned in retirement), Nobel Peace Prize winner and 39^th president of the United States. During the 38 years Carter was at the lectern, some 50,000 students heard unforgettable stories of his time on the world stage, including his hosting the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. With Carter’s retirement from public life, the time-honored tradition now gives students an opportunity to engage in dialogue with international thought leaders.

To Emory President Gregory L. Fenves, the partnership with The Carter Center is one of the most powerful ways that the university’s mission is implemented around the world.

“Emory’s decades-long partnership with The Carter Center is unlike any other in higher education, benefitting communities the world over,” says Fenves. “It continues to harness the immense talent of Emory scholars and alumni, applying their research and expertise to carry out President Carter’s profound vision for peace, health and human rights across continents and borders.” 

Strengthened by the involvement of Emory faculty and students, The Carter Center has improved life for people in more than 80 countries by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy, human rights and economic opportunity; preventing diseases; and improving mental health care.

The faculty appointment that “electrified” the campus

The year 1979 looms large in Emory’s history for two reasons: Robert and George Woodruff made a gift of $105 million to the university, shattering previous records for philanthropy to an academic institution.

And Jimmy Carter visited to help break ground for Cannon Chapel at the invitation of then-Emory President James T. Laney. The mood was jubilant, having a sitting U.S. president on campus.

When Carter’s term ended in 1981, he sought a university affiliation close to home. Carter attracted the interest of many leading higher education institutions, so Laney lost no time in meeting with him. Laney assured the Carters that “he had a moral and ethical vision for the university that they could share and help to advance.” In turn, Carter presented his vision of an “action-oriented” policy research center to advance peace and health worldwide.

Laney notes, “It was obvious to me that Carter should be allied with Emory both as a professor and through the yet-to-be Carter Center. From its beginning, Emory had been built on academic rigor and moral inquiry.”

Carter joined the faculty as University Distinguished Professor in April 1982, having been assured he would always be able to talk honestly with Emory students — a vow he has kept, even solving the hotly debated question at the 2018 Town Hall of whether he prefers his peanut butter smooth or crunchy.

Laney recalls that Carter’s presence “electrified” the campus as he crossed it with Secret Service guards in tow heading to a lecture hall or class.

“I’ve taught in all the schools at Emory,” Carter says. “It has kept me aware of the younger generation, their thoughts and ideals.”

Humble origins and heady ambitions

On Sept. 1, 1982, The Carter Center began as an office staffed by just three people — including Carter — on the 10^th floor of Emory’s Robert W. Woodruff Library while its permanent home was being constructed just a few miles away.

Walking on campus one day, Laney and Carter had a chance meeting with Karl Deutsch, then a Harvard social scientist and doyen of international diplomacy. Deutsch told Carter, “You will go down in history as the first president to have made human rights central to foreign policy.” Recalls Laney, “Carter was deeply touched, and for me it was additional validation of Emory’s partnership with him. It has grown through the years and now seems to have been destined from the beginning.”

In the early years, a few key individuals provided the bridge between the center and Emory. Jointly appointed Carter Center fellows such as Robert A. Pastor in the Department of Political Science, William H. Foege in Rollins School of Public Health, Frank S. Alexander in the School of Law and others established direct links between the center’s humanitarian work and scholarship at Emory. Foege was well known to Carter, having served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during Carter’s administration.

Numerous Carter Center staff are Emory graduates, and more than 2,000 Emory undergraduates and graduate assistants have interned there. Camila Giraldez 24C served in the Rule of Law program and comments: “Staff lunch days were the best because I got to hear about what’s going on in opposite corners of the world.”

Four Carter Center health program directors — Eve Byrd, mental health; Kelly Callahan, trachoma; Gregory Noland, river blindness, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis and the Hispaniola Initiative; and Adam Weiss, Guinea worm — hold degrees from Emory.

“President and Mrs. Carter saw in Emory a collaborator whose principles and ethics reflected the values they believed in,” says Paige Alexander, CEO of The Carter Center. “The partnership remains vital to our global mission, with Emory graduates, researchers, thinkers and leaders helping us build a healthier, more peaceful world.”

Located on Emory’s campus and dedicated in 2001, the Lillian Carter Center for Global Health and Social Responsibility honors Carter’s mother, who was a nurse and social activist, by improving the health of vulnerable people worldwide through nursing education, research, practice and policy.

The Carter Center Mental Health Program, led by Mrs. Carter until her retirement, benefits from a dynamic relationship with Emory that includes the departments of psychiatry and psychology as well as the Rollins School of Public Health and Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.

Teacher at Emory, exemplar for the world

In 2002, Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited his “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

Cheers erupted around the world but were perhaps loudest close to home. “On behalf of everyone at Emory, where President Carter has served for many years as a member of the faculty, we are immensely proud that the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to this messenger and apostle of peace and understanding,” said then-Emory President William M. Chace.

A later-arriving honor occasioned good-natured ribbing between Carter and Emory leaders: tenure. Carter first raised the question of his receiving tenure with Laney, who facetiously said that not only would Carter have to develop a good reputation as a teacher, he needed to write books too. As Carter laughingly recalled, “So I wrote one book, then I wrote two books … finally I wrote 33 books, and Claire [Sterk, Emory’s 20^th president] finally granted me tenure.”

His tenured faculty appointment in 2019 in four schools — Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Oxford College, Candler School of Theology and Rollins School of Public Health — reflects the breadth of the president’s impact on numerous fields. 

But asked about his extensive legacy, Carter has listed just three items. Speaking on campus at the 2018 Carter Town Hall, he noted: “I would like to be remembered as a champion of human rights, as a president who kept our country at peace and as having been a distinguished professor at Emory University.”

The sections that follow take a closer look at memorable interactions that have not only strengthened Emory and The Carter Center but benefitted communities close to home and around the world.

^{FACULTY-STAFF COLLABORATION}
Sharing expertise to solve real-world problems

Soon after he joined the university in 2016, Jim Lavery learned about the longstanding partnership between Emory and The Carter Center. Lavery, the inaugural Conrad N. Hilton Chair in Global Health Ethics at Rollins, had just given his introductory lecture at the school when he was approached by the center’s Gregory Noland 18MPH.

In addition to being director of The Carter Center’s river blindness, lymphatic filariasis (LF) and schistosomiasis program, Noland also leads the Hispaniola Initiative to eliminate malaria and LF from the island. But in recent years, progress in eliminating LF in Haiti had stalled due to increased insecurity, especially in the capital, which led to declining rates of drug treatment coverage to prevent infection.

Noland and his team were looking for an independent analysis of how to improve program implementation in these difficult-to-access areas. “This was an opportunity for me and my team to apply our expertise in a partnership with one of the world’s leading global health organizations,” Lavery says. “It was clear to me from the very beginning that it was going to be very rewarding experience.”

The overture was a welcome one to Lavery as a newcomer to Emory. However, such collaboration is part of the legendary symbiosis between Emory and The Carter Center, with the two institutions working hand-in-hand together on initiatives involving everything from global health to international peace.

“Being able to engage with Emory’s experts, as well as faculty and students who are passionate about their respective spaces, is a great amplifier of the center’s impact,” says Barbara Smith, vice president of Peace Programs at The Carter Center. “And the work also provides faculty and students with real-world practical experience that can launch their careers.” 

Even as the relationship has proven mutually beneficial to both institutions — and the individual careers of their representatives — the core of this ongoing cooperation is an enduring trust. “We value the experience and expertise of Emory students and faculty,” adds Kashef Ijaz, the center’s vice president of Health Programs. “And those who come to work with us often seek us out. That speaks volumes to me.”

Lavery was blown away by the amount of access Noland gave him and his team to real-world problems, as well as the opportunity to work side-by-side with The Carter Center’s experts. But he was impressed most of all by the humanity of the center and its people.

He dove into the program, conducted interviews and compiled ideas on how The Carter Center team — which includes former Emory Foege Fellow and longtime center consultant Madsen Beau de Rochars 10MPH — could boost treatment coverage in Haiti. For instance, after learning that many Haitian residents didn’t trust how the drug treatment posts were presented, Lavery’s team made recommendations about how to professionalize the locations, improving signage and issuing uniforms that clearly identified health workers. The Emory-based team also suggested a supplemental house-to-house approach for drug distribution.

Through this collaboration, a vital friendship has been forged. “Jim and I are like two musicians each playing their part in sync with one another,” Noland says. “It’s science and learning in action. And it provides cutting-edge answers to common problems faced by similar programs. The work we do contributes to the learning agenda on the global level.”  

^{WORKING WITH THE CARTERS}
Creating a better world for butterflies — and us all

The 2010 discovery that monarch butterflies use medicinal plants to treat their offspring for disease garnered worldwide publicity for Emory biologist Jaap de Roode. President Jimmy Carter was among those intrigued by the finding.

Before retiring from public life, President Carter was fully present at Emory — meeting regularly with the university president, keeping up with campus news, attending classes, giving lectures and hosting monthly lunches with faculty and staff. He invited de Roode to The Carter Center to join him and others for lunch, and it was de Roode’s turn to be intrigued.

“I was struck by just how normal President Carter is,” de Roode recalls. “We went into the cafeteria at The Carter Center and he lined up with his tray to pay for his lunch with everyone else.”

Lunching with the former U.S. president was far more relaxed and congenial than de Roode could have imagined. “President Carter is very interested in what people do and what they have to say,” de Roode says. “He really likes to listen and learn. He was just so welcoming that it was like having a great lunch conversation with a friend.”

Carter told de Roode that his wife Rosalynn Carter was concerned that many pollinators, including some butterflies, were not thriving due to habitat loss. The former first lady wanted to find ways to help conserve them.

It was not just idle chat.

That lunch conversation led to a visit by both the Carters to de Roode’s lab on the Emory campus, one of just a handful of monarch butterfly laboratories in the world. The couple also joined de Roode’s lab members in 2012 during a field trip to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in central Mexico, where tens of millions of migrating monarchs blanket the trees and landscape in the winter.

Rosalynn Carter was inspired to put her passion into action. She co-founded the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail to help increase habitat for monarchs and other pollinators. She tapped de Roode to serve on the board of directors. The nonprofit took root in Plains, Georgia, and quickly sprouted into 1,700 registered pollinator-friendly gardens.

Mrs. Carter’s surprise gift to her husband on his 90^th birthday was the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Pollinator Garden at The Carter Center, which attracted many enthusiastic volunteers to put it together — including Carter Center staff and their families along with de Roode and his students, who donated plants and expertise along with their labor.

The phenomenal energy of both the Carters, de Roode says, helps galvanize others to take positive action.

“They could be sipping lemonade while sitting on the porch. Instead they are always creating new things to make the world better. It’s inspiring to see people who have already achieved so much in life keep it going,” de Roode says.

^{GUINEA WORM ERADICATION}
Emory graduate leads Carter Center efforts to eradicate Guinea worm

He made no bones about it: President Carter, from his earliest days leading The Carter Center, was committed to eradicating Guinea worm disease from the earth. Reflecting the work of nearly four decades, that goal is closer than ever.

The human case count has dwindled to the single digits, with just six cases (five in Chad, one in South Sudan) of Guinea worm disease being reported in the period between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30 of 2022.

Joyful news — and the progress is nearly unimaginable given the starting point: when President Carter took the lead on eradication in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in at least 21 countries in Africa and Asia.

Now hope burns bright for eradication by 2030, which would make it the first human disease to be stamped out since smallpox in 1980. The campaign is more impressive for having been waged without a vaccine or medicine, relying instead on trust, health education and simple, low-cost methods. For a disease to be declared eradicated, every country in the world must be certified free of human and animal infection.

Adam Weiss 13 EMPH, who directs The Carter Center’s Guinea Worm Eradication Program and earned an executive master’s degree from Rollins School of Public Health, has been in the battle since 2005. Serving in the Peace Corps, he volunteered in the water and sanitation sector of northern Ghana and saw the epidemic, and its ravages, firsthand.

“Hallmarks of The Carter Center’s program are its agility, data-driven decision making, deep-rooted partnerships and commitment to prioritize the needs of the endemic countries,” says Weiss.

The disease has incapacitated people for thousands of years as a result of drinking water contaminated with Guinea worm larvae. About a year later, the adult worm creates a painful skin lesion and emerges over the course of weeks or months. Its victims frequently seek relief by immersing their limbs in water, which renews the cycle of infection by stimulating the worm to release its larvae.

In 1990, Carter met with His Highness Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the United Arab Emirates, who made a substantial personal donation and set in motion a more than 30-year shared commitment to eradication.

At the Guinea Worm Summit in Abu Dhabi in March 2022, organized by The Carter Center and the United Arab Emirates, representatives from impacted countries recommitted to accelerating all Guinea worm eradication efforts. That meeting also showcased the next generation of spirited fighters against this disease, including Jason Carter, chair of The Carter Center Board of Trustees and grandson of Jimmy Carter; and His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, son of the late Sheikh Zayed and now president of the United Arab Emirates.

Among numerous actions to which the participating countries agreed, Chad — as the epicenter of cases — has recommitted to proactively tether dogs to prevent those that are infected from recontaminating water sources. Restraining them also reduces their opportunities to consume infected water.

In August 2022, the prime minister of Japan awarded the Guinea Worm Eradication Program the prestigious Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize in the medical services category, which includes an honorarium of 100 million yen — more than $750,000. Weiss traveled to Tunisia to accept the award, noting: “We at The Carter Center are very grateful for this prestigious award from such an important partner. The Hideyo Noguchi Africa Prize signifies the government of Japan’s high level of interest and involvement in the health and welfare of the people of Africa.”

President Carter is briefed regularly about progress toward eradication, and in his most recent statement said: “Rosalynn and I are encouraged by the continued commitment and persistence of our partners and the citizens in the villages to eradicate Guinea worm. Today we are closer than ever, and I am excited at the prospect of seeing the job finished.”

When eradication happens, expect words to fall away. Already, says Weiss, “I am at a loss to describe how exciting it is to be only a few years from zero cases in the world.”

In addition to Guinea worm, The Carter Center health programs is a pioneer in the eradication, elimination and better control of five other neglected yet preventable diseases: river blindness, trachoma, schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis and malaria in Hispaniola. Read more here.