Leadership Team
Adam Hollowell
Adam Hollowell serves as Senior Research Associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center 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 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
Elizabeth Degefe
Kennedy Ruff
Kennedy Ruff graduated from Guilford College in 2022 with a B.A in Psychology and a minor in Biology. During high school, Kennedy was a part of the first cohort for the Hank & Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute and now oversees the program. In addition to coordinating the Young Scholars Summer Research Institute, Kennedy is a research associate to Dr. Keisha Bentley Edwards with her research in health equity.
Lucas Hubbard
Lucas Hubbard writes stories, articles, and press releases to help illuminate and broadcast the Cook Center’s research, in addition to helping edit reports produced by the Center. He obtained a B.S. in economics from Duke University with a minor in creative writing. Prior to joining the Cook Center, Lucas was the Clay Felker Staff Writer at Duke Magazine.
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 serves as a research associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center.
Rachel Ruff
Rachel Ruff works to disseminate research findings and current events to media materials for the Cook Center past, current, and ongoing projects. She is also responsible for crafting engaging news stories and articles that highlight the events and achievements within the Cook Center. Additionally, Rachel manages and oversees content on the website, updates program information, and leads social media efforts. She actively collaborates with various Cook Center programs to advance their recruitment and enrollment objectives.
Additionally, she works with the Inequality Studies minor and the Hank and Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Research Institute. She graduated from Fayetteville State University with her BA in Political Science and a minor in Creative & Professional Writing.
Her research interests span across Political Science, History, Public Policy, and Literature, with a keen focus on higher education, civic engagement, and race. She is particularly interested in exploring political behavior, the dynamics of the American political system, and the impact of public opinion on legislative processes. Additionally, she is interested in how these concepts shape an understanding of the current state of Black American Politics.
Shahrazad Shareef
Shahrazad Shareef is a critical theorist and a historian who investigates the global expansion of capitalism in the modern era. She earned a BA in Economics from Duke University in 2006, as well as a Ph.D. in comparative literature and an Interdisciplinary Certificate in European Studies in 2021. Her dissertation was entitled: “From Crisis to Restoration: Technical Intellectuals and the Politics of Italy’s Post-war Development”. Her primary research interests include: historical capitalism and cycles of accumulation; theories of surplus value; economic development; Marxist theoretical approaches to historical analysis; the rise of Italian fascism; and philosophy and the development of worker’s consciousness. She is currently working on a book that studies the transformation of the world market through successive cycles of systemic accumulation (British and US-led). In her role at the Cook Center, Shahrazad is building the intellectual identity of the minor in inequality studies and expanding enrollment. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, she looks forward to a day when everyone is free.
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.
Part-Time Staff
JoAnn O’Neal
JoAnn O’Neal works part-time with administrative initiatives at the Cook Center.
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.
He is a member of the Policing Enforcement and Justice working group at the Cook Center.
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. 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 E. Griffith
Eric E. 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.
Garry S. Mitchell, Jr.
Garry S. Mitchell, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He earned his Ph.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was a Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration at the Kennedy School and an Ethics Pedagogy Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics.
With a background as a middle school teacher in New York City, Garry’s commitment to educational justice is deeply intertwined with his identity as an African-American male, descended from enslaved peoples in the United States. His work aims to elevate our understanding of education’s role in shaping equitable societies.
Garry’s research focuses on educational justice and operates at the intersection of history, sociology, and philosophy of education. His work examines the punishment-to-privilege spectrum in K-12 schools and the role of elite education as a catalyst for social, economic, and racial mobility. He also explores the ethical dimensions of college preparatory school programs (CPSPs) that support low-income, minoritized students as they navigate elite educational spaces.
His current research, based on 150 interviews and 500 hours of observational data, investigates the role of CPSPs in shaping the identities and worldviews of upwardly mobile students. This project explores how these programs sculpt students’ experiences in elite secondary schools, focusing on how they navigate gains and sacrifices along their mobility journeys. By revealing the ethical and personal costs of upward mobility, Garry’s work challenges the notion of “mobility as equity,” particularly within elite educational environments.
Henry C. McKoy Jr.
Dr. Henry C. McKoy, Jr. was 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).