Leadership Team
Adam Hollowell
Adam Hollowell serves as Senior Research Associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and Director of the Inequality Studies Minor at Duke University. He is also the Faculty Director of the Benjamin N. Duke Memorial Scholarship Program and Director of the Global Inequality Research Initiative. An award-winning educator, he teaches ethics and inequality studies across multiple departments at Duke University, including the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Program in Education, the Department of History, and the Sanford School of Public Policy. He is the co-author, with Jamie McGhee, of You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge (Broadleaf Books, 2022).
David M. Malone
David Malone’s work focuses on educational psychology, applications of cognitive science to teaching and learning, literacy, student-centered approaches to instruction, experiential and service learning, and learning disabilities.
Gwendolyn Wright
Gwen Wright is the senior administrator and research scientist for the Cook Center. She oversees the development and implementation of programs and projects in support of the strategic vision and goals of the Center.
Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards
Dr. Keisha Bentley-Edwards is the Associate Director of Research and Director of the Health Equity Working Group for the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and an Associate Professor of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, at Duke University. She holds several leadership positions within Duke’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, and faculty affiliations with Duke’s Global Health and Cancer Institutes.
Dr. Bentley-Edwards’ research focuses on how racism, gender, and culture influence development throughout the lifespan, especially for African Americans. Her research emphasizes cultural strengths and eliminating structural barriers to support healthy development in communities, families, and schools. Dr. Bentley-Edwards has published and lectured extensively on the use of racial socialization and racial cohesion strategies to facilitate positive outcomes in Black adolescents, as well as how teacher perceptions and school resources can influence disciplinary practices and classroom management. As head of the Cook Center’s Health Equity Working Group, Dr. Bentley-Edwards leads a mixed method study investigating the relationships between religion and spirituality and cardiovascular disease risk factors for African Americans. She is dedicated to healthy birth and pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health in general. Dr Bentley-Edwards is committed to eliminating racism and its effects on equitable outcomes in health systems, schools, and society. Her research has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, IBM, and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bentley-Edwards regularly shares her expertise on the role of structural racism and bias on health, education and social outcomes with families, policymakers, practitioners, and the media.
Kristen R. Stephens
Kristen Stephens is interested in legal and policy issues with regard to gifted education at the federal, state, and local levels. Her research has also focused on how teachers assess creative student products to inform future instruction.
William A. Darity, Jr. (“Sandy”)
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics, and Business at Duke University. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012) at Stanford, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award in 2012 from the National Economic Association, the organization’s highest honor, and has published or edited 12 books and published more than 210 articles in professional journals.
Research and Administrative Staff
Vontonya Borden
Vontonya Borden is the Associate in Research-Administrative Assistant for the Cook Center. She has worked in several administrative and program support roles – most recently as a staff specialist. She will oversee and perform facility operations for the Cook Center.
Postdoctoral Scholars and Associates
Aten Zaandam
Aten is a management scholar whose research examines how adverse life experiences and perceptions of morality influence the strategic decision-making of top executives. Before joining Duke, he served as a research fellow for the Babson College Center for Entrepreneurship, where he examined how Black healthcare entrepreneurs overcome systematic marginalization. He also worked as a researcher at the Defense Equal Opportunity Institute where he sought to determine how conscious and unconscious racial biases decreased military preparedness.
Ayinwi Muma
Ayinwi Muma is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. Her research examines the impact of regulatory policy changes on entrepreneurial activity across various socially-constructed identity groups, e.g., race and gender.
Her dissertation explores three central questions: First, in “normal times” how do young, relatively unknown entrepreneurial firms introduce novel technologies into established organizational contexts? Second, what happened to investments in early-stage entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 pandemic? Third, how did the June 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade affect subsequent entrepreneurial activity across states in the U.S., and what are the implications for entrepreneurship and labor force participation among women?
Ayinwi holds a B.A. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.B.A. in Strategic Management from Georgia Institute of Technology, and (will soon hold!) a Ph.D. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University in Summer 2023.
Elizabeth Degefe
Pak Hung Lam
Pak Hung is an applied economist whose research interests center on development, education, environmental, and health economics. He is particularly interested in critical issues related to population health, economic development in Africa and Asia, and global environmental health and justice issues. Prior to joining Duke, he earned his Ph.D. in Social Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and served as a Visiting Ph.D. student at the Yale School of Public Health. His website can be found here.
Quran Karriem
Quran is an experimental musician, media artist and theorist working primarily with electronic and algorithmic media. His research is concerned with human improvisation and automated decision, particularly insofar as they reproduce sovereign power and racial hierarchy through semi-autonomous knowledge systems. His work examines the power relations and ideologies that inhere in the design of digital systems, processes and interfaces, and is motivated by a concern with the operative and recursive nature of computational, racialized capital in postmodern sociotechnical assemblages.
A multiple award-winning software designer and former product executive, Quran has led development teams for a number of media and technology companies and applies a decade of direct experience with systems design, data management and organizational structure in the context of ‘start-up culture’ to social critique. His product initiatives have been recognized by such global research and trade bodies as Gartner Research, the Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association (GSMA), the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) and Frost & Sullivan.
Sungmee Kim
Sungmee is an applied microeconomist specializing in education and health policy for K-12 students and young adults in the United States and South Korea. With a focus on closing the gap between diverse groups, Sungmee conducts quantitative research to integrate educational and health outcomes to inform policy decisions.
Her recent work provides a comprehensive analysis of gender differences in remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting trends and potential mechanisms behind disparities in academic performance throughout the period of school closures and the subsequent return to in-person learning. Her ongoing research includes examining the impact of the ACA Medicaid expansion on closing the “coverage gap” for low-income young adults and investigating how variations in primary learning modalities during the pandemic influenced trends in child maltreatment allegations and foster care placements.
Sungmee holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Georgia State University, where she worked as a graduate research assistant at the Metro Atlanta Policy Lab for Education (MAPLE) of the Georgia Policy Labs.
Wenran Fan
Wenran is an applied economist with research interest focus on environmental policy and environmental justice. Her research aims to use survey data to explore the potential discrepancies in recreational benefits among different socioeconomic groups. She is currently a PhD candidate in economics at Iowa State University, received her Master’s degree from Boston University and her Bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University.
Will Damron
Will is a postdoctoral associate at the Cook Center. His research focuses on the economic history of the American South. Prior to joining the Cook Center, he completed a PhD in economics at Yale University and a BS at Davidson College.
Xiongfei Li
Xiongfei Li recently received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California. His research focuses on the intersection between inequality and the labor market, especially in the context of China. He has conducted research on topics including gender inequalities, educational return and inequality, and environmental policy biases. Prior to USC, he received a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a bachelor’s degree from Nankai University. He will join the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University as a postdoctoral associate in August 2023.
Doctoral Scholars
Arko Dasgupta
Arko Dasgupta is a PhD candidate in history at Carnegie Mellon University and an Associate in Research in the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. His research interests include empire, race, Modern India, early Indian immigration in the United States, and the Civil Rights Movement. He is currently working on his dissertation titled The Colour of Anticolonialism: Locating Antiracism in the Indian Freedom Struggle, 1893-1964. He is a Prafulla C Mukerji Fellow and a Kedia-Tayur Fellow in South Asian American History at Carnegie Mellon University. He has an MPhil in International Studies from Jamia Millia Islamia, an MA in Conflict Analysis & Peace Building from Jamia Millia Islamia, and a BA in Economics, Political Science, Sociology from St Joseph’s College, Bangalore. Access Arko’s website here: arkodasgupta.com
Faculty Affiliates
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.
Research Assistants and Fellows
Brittany Reaves
I am a JD/MA in History dual degree student at North Carolina Central University. My research has been centered around constitutional law, civil rights, and African American history. As a teaching assistant of Dr. Jim Harper II, I was able to participate in the History of Inequality course by adding a legal perspective to the content, assisting with lectures, and giving constructive feedback to undergraduate students on their work products.
Catherine Kiplagat
Catherine is a freshman majoring in Chemistry hoping to pursue biotech research and is a student-athlete on the track and field team. Catherine participated in the Young Scholars program prior to Duke and researched the effects of black representation on predominately black cities and how mental health impacts recidivism rates in black inmates.
Imari Smith
A recent graduate of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health with a Master of Public Health in Health Behavior, Imari Smith currently works as an Associate in Research for the Cook Center’s Health Equity Working Group. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Duke University in women’s studies with a minor in chemistry, and was the first in the history of the Women’s Studies department (now Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies) to graduate with Highest Distinction for her honors thesis titled Black Femininity through the White Speculum. Through her work with the Cook Center, Imari continues her studies of the intersections of gender, race, class, and health inequities.
Olanrewaju “Lanre” Adisa
Olanrewaju “Lanre” Adisa is a graduate student in the Duke University School of Medicine and a member of the Health Equity Working Group with the Cook Center.
Qirui Ju
Qirui Ju is a Master of Arts in Economics graduate from Duke University. He is passionate about conducting quantitative research on policy-related questions, including inequality, labor, technology, and health. Qirui aims to promote progress in society through his research. Prior to Duke, he graduated with the highest distinction from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Qirui will serve as a research associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.
Runling Wu
Runling is currently helping Dr. Ali with his collaborators on disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on different racial communities. Her research interests include intergenerational mobility, early childhood education and broad impacts of social inequality.
Soumya Mathew
Soumya is a first year Master of Public Policy (MPP) student at Sanford School of Public Policy. She has three years of research experience in the development sector. Currently, she is assisting Prof Raffi E. García with his research on automation and pay transparency.
Xin Lin
Xin is a research assistant working with Dr. Raffi García on a project investigating the game theory of self-reporting race in small business loan applications. They are also researching gender and racial inequality in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
Visiting Faculty
Raffi E. García
Prof. Raffi E. García 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. García 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.
