Our faculty members and affiliates are integral to our mission of studying the causes and consequences of inequality and developing remedies for these disparities and their adverse effects.
Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE)
The Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE) is a dedicated program aiming to enhance diversity within the realm of economics.
Through this initiative, we support and uplift scholars from diverse backgrounds, fostering an inclusive academic community.
Visiting Faculty
Our Visiting Faculty program invites esteemed educators and researchers from around the globe to engage in collaborative research projects, teach Duke courses, and contribute to the Cook Center’s rich academic environment. These opportunities are subject to the availability of faculty funding.
Raffi E. GarcĂa
Prof. Raffi E. GarcĂa is an Assistant Professor of Finance in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interests are in financial economics, empirical industrial organization, and gender and personnel economics. His research focuses on measuring and understanding the effects of regulations and unexpected events or shocks on a firm and individual behavior, strategy, and performance. Prof. GarcĂa received his Ph.D. in International Economics and Finance from Brandeis University in 2018. He also holds a master’s degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Boston College. Prof. Garcia is currently a visiting professor at The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University.
Faculty Affiliates
Our faculty affiliates engage in equity-related research initiatives and actively contribute to projects within the Cook Center’s research themes.
Alberto Ortega
Dr. Alberto Ortega is an Assistant Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University. His current work focuses on the causes and structural factors that lead to risky behaviors and explores how public policy can mitigate the adverse consequences for vulnerable and low-income populations. This research includes contributions in the areas of substance use, mental health, crime, and policing. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Ortega was also an  Emerging Poverty Scholars Fellow at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an NSF Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics Fellow, and an American Economic Association Summer Program Fellow and mentor.
Ashleigh Shelby Rosette
Dr. Ashleigh Shelby Rosette is the James L. Vincent Distinguished Professor of Leadership at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She is one of the foremost leading scholars on research that resides at the intersection of leadership, gender, and race and is one of the most decorated teachers in the history of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business having received the Teaching Excellence Award of the Year a record-breaking twelve times within thirteen years.
She has written numerous academic research articles on diverse leadership (her primary area of research) and negotiations (her secondary area of research) and published them in top academic journals and outlets. Professor Rosette’s research has also been featured in prominent media outlets, such as Forbes, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Business Week, the Financial Times, USAToday, Huffington Post and National Public Radio.
Professor Rosette has earned several distinguished awards, including ranked as one of the Favorite Professors by Poets & Quants, recipient of the PhD Project’s Trailblazer Award, and the Bank of America Faculty Award (Fuqua’s highest faculty honor). She received her Bachelor in Business Administration degree and Master in Professional Accounting degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in Management and Organizations from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Prior to her career in academia, she worked as a Certified Public Accountant.
Bruce S. Orenstein
Bruce Orenstein is currently producing the documentary series Shame of Chicago: The Segregation of an American City. He also runs the Telling Our Stories Student Working Group at the Cook Center and teaches documentary production at the Arts of the Moving Image Program. Orenstein founded and directed the Chicago Video Project, one of the nation’s first studios dedicated to producing organizing-driven videos for grassroots social change organizations. His television credits include the Emmy-award winning WTTW documentary No Place to Live, and the nationally broadcast PBS documentaries, The Democratic Promise: The Life and Legacy of Saul Alinsky and American Idealist: The Story of Sargent Shriver. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Orenstein led direct-action community organizations in low-income communities in Chicago and Seattle.
Carliss Chatman
Carliss Chatman is an Associate Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law specializing in the fields of corporate law, commercial law, race and entrepreneurship, and ethics. Professor Chatman brings 11 years of legal practice as a commercial litigation attorney in Houston, Texas working in complex commercial litigation, mass tort litigation and the representation of small and start-up businesses in the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and lends it to a common sense approach to her teaching and scholarship, bringing practical experience to all of her classes, and making complex legal concepts within reach for students of all backgrounds. In practice, she focused on trial law, appeals and arbitration in pharmaceutical, healthcare, mass torts, product liability, as well as oil, gas and mineral law. In addition to negotiating settlements and obtaining successful verdicts, Professor Chatman has also analyzed and drafted position statements regarding the constitutionality of statutes and the impact of statutory revisions for presentation to the Texas Legislature. In addition to her more traditional scholarship, Professor Chatman writes for broader audiences in publications including: the Hill, Slate, Time Magazine, CNN Online, TheGrio, Barron’s, and the Washington Post, with features in press pieces in Bloomberg, Forbes and in the New York Times, and with media appearances on CBS News and CBS Radio, ProPublica, Reuters, and NHK. She has produced panels and her podcast, Getting Common is available on Spotify, Apple Music and replays via Voice America online radio. Professor Chatman is a 2004 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, where she was a member of the Texas Journal of Women and the Law, and served on the Student Recruitment and Orientation Committee. She received her bachelor’s degree in 2001 from Duke University with honors in English and African-American Studies.
Eric Griffith
Dr. Eric Griffith received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as an MA in psychology from Boston University. He completed his dissertation fieldwork in central Mexico, focusing on the experiences of familial caregivers for people living with Alzheimer’s disease. Eric’s research interests include biocultural anthropology, dementia, cognitive aging, health disparities, and mixed methods research. As a postdoctoral fellow with the Cook Center, Eric is working on the NIH-funded project “The influence of religion/spirituality on Alzheimer’s Disease and its related dementias (ADRD) for African Americans.
Fenaba R. Addo
Fenaba R. Addo is an associate professor of public policy. Her recent work examines debt and wealth inequality with a focus on family and relationships and higher education, and union formation and economic strain as a social determinant of health and well-being. She has also focused on the role that consumer and family policies serve in reinforcing these relationships. Widely published in academic journals and policy outlets, her work on racial disparities in student debt, older Black women and wealth, and the Millennial racial wealth gap reflects her interests in bridging social demography with economic inequality, and sheds light on the ways that societal inequalities stem from historical legacies of racial exclusion and discrimination, and how they get reproduced over time. Dr. Addo was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar. She received her Ph.D. in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University and holds a B.S. in Economics from Duke University. Dr. Addo was the Lorna Jorgensen Wendt Associate Professor of Money, Relationships, and Equality (MORE) in the School of Human Ecology’s Department of Consumer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prior to joining the department.
She recently coauthored, with sociologist Jason Houle, A Dream Defaulted: The Student Debt Crisis Among Black Borrowers (Harvard Education Press, 2022), which centers the stories of black young adults within the broader student loan debt landscape and proposes policy solutions that can address racial disparities in student loan debt.
Henry McKoy
Dr. Henry C. McKoy, Jr. is the inaugural Director of the Office of State and Community Energy Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy, a presidential appointment he received in July 2022. He was previously the lead entrepreneurship faculty and Director of Entrepreneurship at NC Central University in the School of Business and was also on the faculty of the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Professor of Practice in Strategy and Entrepreneurship. In addition, he taught in Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and was part of the faculty of Duke’s Executive Leadership Institute where he teaches on Public-Private Partnerships. Dr. McKoy has been a Fellow of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at UNC-Chapel Hill, as well as an Aspen Institute Scholar. He previously had an appointment at Harvard University Kennedy School’s Ash Center, where he was an Associate Fellow of Municipal Innovation, and led the effort to launch a national network of economically inclusive and equitable cities. He served from 2010-2012 in the North Carolina Department of Commerce where he was appointed by the Governor as Assistant Secretary of Commerce. He holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill (BS, Ph.D.) and Duke (MS).
Jay A. Pearson
Jay A. Pearson’s research examines how policy sponsored structural inequality influences social determination of health. He is particularly interested in the health effects of conventional and non-conventional resources associated with racial assignment, ethnic identity, national origin, immigration, and cultural orientations.
