Serpentine passages are found in a number of engineering applications including turbine blade cooling passages. The design of effective cooling passages for high-temperature turbine blades depends in part on the ability to predict heat transfer, thus requiring an accurate representation of the turbulent flow field. These passages are subjected to strong curvature and rotational effects, and the resulting turbulent flow field is fairly complex. An understanding of the flow physics for flows with strong curvature and rotation is required in order to improve the design of turbine blade cooling passages. Experimental measurements of certain turbulence quantities for such configurations can be challenging to obtain, especially near solid surfaces, making the serpentine passage an ideal candidate for a direct numerical simulation (DNS). A DNS study has been conducted to investigate the coupled effect of strong curvature and rotation by simulating turbulent flow through a fully developed, smooth wall, round-ended, isothermal serpentine channel subjected to orthogonal mode rotation. The geometry investigated has an average radius of curvature R_c/δ=2.0 in the curved section and dimensions 12πδ×2δ×3πδ in the streamwise, transverse, and spanwise directions. The computational domain consists of periodic inflow/outflow boundaries, two solid wall boundaries, and periodic boundaries in the spanwise direction. The simulations were conducted for Reynolds number, Re_b=5600, and rotation numbers, Ro_b,z=0 and 0.32. Differences observed between the stationary and rotating cases are discussed in terms of the mean velocity, secondary flow, and Reynolds stresses.