40 Fun Facts About Emory University

Lord Dooley, the unofficial mascot who roams Emory in a black cape and top hat, is what kind of figure?

A skeleton, Dooley first appeared in an 1899 campus article written as if by the bones in a science lab. He borrows his first name and middle initial from whoever leads Emory.

Emory is nicknamed after which Atlanta company, thanks to gifts from the Candler and Woodruff families?

Coca-Cola money built modern Emory: company founder Asa Candler gave $1 million and 75 acres in 1914, and the Woodruff brothers added $105 million in stock in 1979.

What did Emory's Carlos Museum buy in 1999 and return to Egypt in 2003?

A royal mummy, identified as Pharaoh Ramesses I with help from Emory medical experts, went home as a goodwill gift. He now lies in the Luxor Museum.

Which TV series kept in its opening credits a car jump filmed outside Seney Hall on Emory's original campus?

The Dukes of Hazzard sent the General Lee flying over a police car outside Seney Hall for its first episode in 1979. MTV restaged the stunt in 2005.

Which animal did Emory pranksters lead to the third floor of Seney Hall in 2008, then barricade inside?

A zebra capped a prank tradition that began with roosters smuggled into classrooms. By the 1930s students were coaxing goats and cows to the upper floors.

Which federal health agency built its headquarters on 15 acres that Emory donated in 1947?

The CDC still sits beside the campus on Clifton Road, and its scientists work with Emory on vaccines and outbreak response.

Which Jon Krakauer book follows Christopher McCandless, an Emory graduate of 1990 who died in the Alaskan bush?

Into the Wild recounts how McCandless gave more than $24,000 in college savings to Oxfam after graduating, then drifted across North America for two years.

Which former US president taught at Emory for decades and held an annual town hall with its students?

Jimmy Carter joined the faculty as a University Distinguished Professor in 1982, the year he and Emory set up the center that bears his name.

Which US team, nicknamed the Magnificent Seven, lived on Emory's campus during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics?

Women's gymnastics won its first US Olympic team gold that summer. Emory also lodged officials and journalists, and a campus ballroom became a press center.

Which virus did Emory University Hospital treat in 2014 in the first such cases in the Western Hemisphere?

Ebola arrived with Kent Brantly, an American doctor infected while treating patients in Liberia. Emory's isolation unit discharged him, recovered, on August 21.

Which Nobel Peace laureate spoke at Emory's 1998 Commencement and launched its Buddhist studies program in India?

The Dalai Lama was later named a presidential professor at Emory, and the program he set up in Dharamsala grew alongside the Emory-Tibet Partnership founded that same year.

What must Emory students offer Lord Dooley during Dooley's Week if they want him to cancel their class?

A limerick, if it is well written, may persuade Dooley to dismiss the class for the day. The spring celebration held in his name also brings a concert and giveaways.

Emory began in 1836 in a rural town 38 miles east of Atlanta named after which English university city?

Oxford still hosts Emory's original campus, where nearly a thousand first- and second-year students begin their degrees before moving on to Atlanta.

Which Protestant denomination founded Emory College in 1836 and named it for one of its own bishops?

Methodists won a state charter for the college in December 1836, and its first fifteen students arrived two years later.

Which bird did an Emory Wheel sports editor pick as the athletic mascot in 1960, after students showed no interest?

The eagle won by default: the editor chose it himself, reasoning that the name fit and would look good on decorations. Emory had gone without an athletic mascot for most of its history.

Which CNN chief medical correspondent built his career as a neurosurgeon on the Emory School of Medicine faculty?

Sanjay Gupta became an associate professor of neurosurgery at Emory and operated at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital on spine and trauma cases.

Which Pulitzer-winning author of The Color Purple has her papers held in Emory's Rose Library?

Alice Walker's archive sits at Emory beside the papers of Flannery O'Connor, Langston Hughes and Seamus Heaney.

Emory University Hospital began in 1904 in an Atlanta mansion that which Union general's army had spared?

William Sherman's army left the building standing during the Civil War. Wesley Memorial Hospital opened in it with 50 beds and moved to the Emory campus in 1922.

Which band's guitarist Peter Buck dropped out of Emory before the group formed in the college town of Athens?

R.E.M. came together after Buck left Emory and took a job at Wuxtry Records in Athens, where he met singer Michael Stipe.

Which folk rock duo took its name while studying at Emory and played weekly at a bar in Emory Village?

Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers had met in elementary school, and both transferred to Emory after growing homesick at other universities.

Which golfer, co-founder of the Masters Tournament, studied at Emory before passing the bar after three semesters?

Bobby Jones arrived in 1926 already holding an engineering degree and a Harvard literature degree, and four years later he won golf's Grand Slam.

Which virus is treated with emtricitabine, a drug discovered at Emory and listed by the WHO as essential?

HIV patients take emtricitabine under the name Emtriva and inside combination pills such as Truvada. Emory's Dennis Liotta, Raymond Schinazi and Woo-Baeg Choi discovered it.

Emory researchers played a key role in the 2020 nationwide trial of which company's COVID-19 vaccine?

Moderna's vaccine was evaluated by Emory's Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit, on a campus where scientists meet every month at a Vaccine Dinner Club.

Which animals are studied at the national research center that moved from Florida to Emory's campus in 1965?

Primates have been its subject since psychologist Robert Yerkes opened it with Yale in 1930. Emory took his name off the center in 2022.

Which supernatural TV drama used Emory's original campus as the set for its fictional Whitmore College?

The Vampire Diaries first shot scenes in the library, quad and theater, then made the campus its regular college location. The 2015 comedy Vacation filmed there too.

Which New York shoe and fashion designer graduated from Emory in 1976 before joining his family's footwear firm?

Kenneth Cole later backed a fellowship at Emory, created in 2001, that trains students in community building and social change.

Emory graduate Adam Richman became famous hosting which Travel Channel show built around eating challenges?

Man v. Food ran for four seasons with Richman, who took a degree in international studies at Emory and then a master's at the Yale School of Drama.

Which Atlanta university hired Isaac Hopkins, then president of Emory College, as its own first president in 1888?

Georgia Tech wanted Hopkins because he had started a technology department at Emory. The two schools now run a joint biomedical engineering department.

Which British monarch is said to have given Emory president Alexander Means the bell now hanging in Seney Hall?

Queen Victoria is said to have given Means the bell, cast in 1796 and now the oldest permanent monument at Emory. It rings once for every graduating student each year.

Which Booker Prize-winning novelist joined Emory as a writer in residence and placed his archive in its library?

Salman Rushdie's papers joined a collection already strong in modern poets, among them Ted Hughes, W. B. Yeats and a long list of Irish writers.

Which last living leader of the civil rights Big Six gave the keynote at Emory's 2014 Commencement?

John Lewis also received an honorary doctorate that day, and a year later an anonymous $1.5 million gift began funding a civil rights chair in his name.

Emory theology graduate Kiyoshi Tanimoto is one of six survivors profiled in which John Hersey book?

Hiroshima follows Tanimoto through the atomic bombing. He later used friendships made while studying in America to arrange reconstructive surgery for young bomb victims.

Emory-trained lawyer James Starnes was navigator of which battleship when Japan signed its surrender on deck?

USS Missouri hosted the ceremony that ended the Second World War, and Starnes stood watch as officer of the deck while the documents were signed.

The Emory Wheel, the student newspaper founded in 1919, puns on an emery wheel, a device used for what job?

Sharpening tools is the point of the pun: the paper's first editorial promised to sharpen the intellect of the university community.

Which future Speaker, co-author of the 1994 Contract with America, earned his history degree from Emory in 1965?

Newt Gingrich went on to a doctorate in European history at Tulane and taught at a state college before winning a seat in Congress in 1978.

At which NCAA level do Emory's varsity teams compete, in a conference with Chicago, NYU and Brandeis?

Division III suits a university whose 1890s leader Warren Candler opposed intercollegiate sports as an evil and set up a model intramural program instead.

What did Emory buy for $345,000 so that its campus would touch Atlanta's city limits and could be annexed?

A small house of 1,240 square feet, partly inside the old city line, is the only link between the campus and the rest of Atlanta. The annexation took effect in 2018.

Which famous landscape architect laid out Druid Hills, Emory's Atlanta neighborhood, as one of his last commissions?

Frederick Law Olmsted gave Druid Hills a chain of green spaces along Ponce de Leon Avenue that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

How did Bishop John Emory, the university's namesake, die in 1835, a year before the college was chartered?

A carriage accident killed him near his Maryland home in 1835. The Georgia church conference he had led a year earlier named its new college for him in 1836.

Henry Hornbostel, architect of Emory's first Atlanta buildings, earlier won a contest to design which Pittsburgh campus?

Carnegie Mellon came first, in 1904, and Hornbostel became a professor there. He also gave New York's Manhattan and Hell Gate bridges their architecture.