Tenure Awarded to Faculty in Various Disciplines Across Campus
Earning tenure after a rigorous review process by peers inside and outside Duke is a testament to the caliber of each individual faculty member and the impact of their research, teaching, service and mentoring, as well as their reputation in their disciplines. It is also an invitation to be a partner in shaping the future of Duke and its core mission and playing a role in advancing its excellence and broader impact.
Information provided by the Office of Institutional Research includes recently tenured faculty at the associate professor rank with appointment dates of November 2022 to September 2023, plus those hired at the rank of associate professor with tenure since last year's list.
Nicole Barnes
Associate Professor of History
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is an associate professor of history with a secondary appointment in the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, and an affiliation with Duke Global Health Institute. She researches and teaches the history of medicine, public health and global health from a gendered perspective. Her first book, “Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945,” received the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association in 2019 and the William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine in 2020. Barnes joined the Duke faculty in 2014 and earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in 2012.
Tenure date: January 1, 2023
Michael Cary
Associate Professor and Elizabeth C. Clipp Term Chair of Nursing
Michael Paul Cary, Jr., associate professor and Elizabeth C. Clipp Term Chair of Nursing at the School of Nursing, is a health services researcher and applied data scientist. He is the first African American faculty member to be awarded tenure in the School of Nursing. Leveraging AI and machine learning, he investigates health disparities associated with aging, actively contributing to strategies that advance health equity and enhance healthcare delivery for diverse older adult populations. Dr. Cary’s impactful research, generously supported by the National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Nursing Research, and the Duke Clinical and Translational Science Institute, underscores his commitment to pioneering advancements in the field. Recently appointed as the inaugural AI Health Equity Scholar by Duke Health, Cary spearheads groundbreaking efforts to detect and mitigate bias in clinical algorithms perpetuating racial and ethnic health inequities. Dr. Cary earned a bachelor’s degree in health services administration from James Madison University and a comprehensive trio of degrees — bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral — in nursing from the University of Virginia.
Tenure date: November 1, 2023
Samuel Fury Childs Daly
Associate Professor of African & African American Studies
Samuel Fury Childs Daly is a historian of twentieth century Africa. His research combines legal, military and social history to describe Africa’s history since independence. His recent book, “A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War,” connects the crisis conditions of the Nigerian Civil War to the forms of crime that came to be associated with Nigeria in its wake. This book won the J. Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association and the Fage & Oliver Prize from the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom. It also received honorable mention for the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award from the American Society for Legal History. He is currently writing three books: a book about militarism’s legal forms, a global history of military desertion and a history of military imposters.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Xingyuan Fang
Associate Professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics
Xingyuan (Ethan) Fang is an associate professor of biostatistics and bioinformatics in the Duke University School of Medicine. He earned his Ph.D. in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton University in 2016. He works on different data science problems from computational and inferential perspectives. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation. Fang joined the Duke faculty in 2022.
Tenure date: November 1, 2022
Sarah Gaither
Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience
Sarah Gaither is Nicholas J. and Theresa M. Leonardy Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Her research program investigates the attitudinal and behavioral effects stemming from exposure to racial and gender diversity to pinpoint pathways that one can utilize to foster more positive group relations for both adult and child populations. Gaither joined Duke as an assistant professor in 2016. She earned her Ph.D. from Tufts University in 2014.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Leanne Gilbertson
Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Leanne Gilbertson’s research focuses on sustainable design of emerging materials and products. She integrates molecular design and systems-level analysis to advance minimally impactful, high performing solutions that address today’s most pressing challenges at the intersection of environmental and public health. Prior to joining Duke in 2023, Gilbertson was an associate professor and the Fulton C. Noss Faculty Fellow in the CEE Department at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed a postdoc in the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University and holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University’s Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Gilbertson received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry with a minor in education from Hamilton College, after which she spent several years as a secondary school teacher before returning to graduate school.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Johann Guilleminot
Paul Ruffin Scarborough Associate Professor of Engineering
Johann Guilleminot joined Duke in 2017 as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Prior to that, he held a Maître de Conférences position in the Multiscale Modeling and Simulation Laboratory at Université Paris-Est in France. He earned an M.S. (2005) and Ph.D. (2008) in theoretical mechanics from the University of Lille 1 Science and Technology (France) and received his Habilitation (2014) in mechanics from Université Paris-Est. Habilitation is the highest academic degree in France. Guilleminot’s research focuses on uncertainty quantification, computational mechanics and materials science, as well as on topics at the interface between these fields. He is particularly interested in the multiscale analysis of linear/nonlinear heterogeneous materials (including biological and engineered ones), homogenization theory, statistical inverse problems and stochastic modeling with applications for computational science and engineering.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Alicia Jiménez
Associate Professor in Classical Studies
Alicia Jiménez is an associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies. She has wide-ranging interests in postcolonial theory, ancient Roman imperialism and the material traces of violence in the creation of the provinces of the Roman empire, with a special focus on the Iberian Peninsula. She is the author of “Imagines hibridae. A postcolonial approach to the study of the Baetican necropolis” (in Spanish, 2008), an analysis of the impact of Roman colonization in the funerary rituals of southern Spain and how different discourses about collective ancestry were simultaneously mediated in the forum and the tomb. Her second book, “Imitation and Power in Ancient Rome: an Archaeology of Mimesis,” investigates how the Roman provinces resembled the metropolis (or not) and the power dynamics enmeshed in imitation processes. She is the PI of Duke’s excavation project at the army camps near Numantia (Renieblas, Spain, 2nd-1st c. BCE), one of the oldest Roman camps and a key site to understand the role of the army in the creation of the first provinces. Alicia is also a cofounder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory, a multiuniversity/community research group studying Durham’s African American burial grounds, sharing their histories with the public and reinvigorating them as spaces of dignity and learning (PI Adam Rosenblatt).
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Nuri Bora Keskin
Associate Professor of Business Administration
Bora Keskin is an associate professor in the operations management area at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Bora received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in 2012. Before joining the faculty at Duke University in 2015, he worked at McKinsey & Company as a consultant in banking and telecommunications industries, and at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of operations management. Bora’s main research studies management problems that involve decision-making under uncertainty. He has published papers in leading research journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Mathematics of Operations Research. In 2019, Bora was awarded the Lanchester Prize for the development of a novel paradigm for the modeling and analysis of online dynamic optimization problems that are subject to temporal uncertainty.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Divine Kumah
Associate Professor of Physics
Divine Kumah received his B.S. in physics from Southern University, Baton Rouge, and Ph.D. in applied physics from the University of Michigan in 2009. His postdoctoral research work was performed at the Center for Research in Interface and Surface Phenomena at Yale University. His research interests are in experimental condensed matter physics and are aimed at understanding the novel electronic and magnetic properties which emerge at the interfaces between crystalline materials. The Kumah Research Lab uses state of the art atomic layer-by-layer deposition techniques including molecular beam epitaxy to fabricate thin crystalline oxide films. The group is focused on understanding how atomic-scale structural distortions at interfaces can be manipulated to induce novel electronic and magnetic phenomena and the development of pathways for harnessing these unique functionalities for electronic and energy applications. Tools used by the group include atomic force microscopy, electron diffraction and synchrotron-based x-ray spectroscopy and diffraction.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Andrea Lanteri
Associate Professor of Economics
Professor Lanteri obtained his Ph.D. in economics in 2015 from the London School of Economics. He received a Laurea Triennale and Magistrale in Economics, Catholic University of Milan, Italy. Since 2023, Lanteri has been an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Duke University and a research affiliate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His main research interests lie in macroeconomics. Specifically, his interests include investment and durable-goods markets, firm dynamics and fiscal policy.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Michael Lynch
W. H. Gardner, Jr. Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Michael Lynch is W. H. Gardner, Jr. Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering. His research is focused on genetically engineering microbes to shut off their growth circuits and turn on new pathways to produce different compounds — improving production of biofuels, pharmacological molecules and industrial chemicals. Lynch’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Naval Air Warfare Center. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005 and M.D. from the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado.
Tenure date: November 1, 2022
Christopher Ouma
Associate Professor of English
Newly arrived at Duke from a professorship at the University of Cape Town, Ouma grew up in Kenya, leaving his home country in East Africa after earning his bachelor’s degree to pursue graduate studies in South Africa. His Ph.D. thesis, “Childhood in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction,” led him into the world of West African literature. The associate professor of English’s current book project, “Small/Little/Literary Magazines and Pan-African Imagination, 1955-1975,” examines how literary ideas spread across the continent during the period when many countries were gaining independence. His research and teaching interests include the broader field of contemporary African and African Diasporic literary and cultural production. He is interested in African popular culture and black print cultures. He has held fellowships at the Open University in Milton Keynes , University of Johannesburg and the Mandela Fellowship at Harvard University. Ouma is the author of “Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past.” Ouma earned his B.A. (1st Class Hons) from Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya. He then earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Tenure date: August 1, 2023
Sarah Pourciau
Associate Professor of German Studies
Before coming to Duke, Sarah Pourciau held positions at Stanford University, Princeton University and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. Her research explores the intersections of philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth-century German and Austrian culture. Her first book, “The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science,” traces the nineteenth-century emergence and twentieth-century transformation of a structuralist approach to language and poetics, teasing out the pivotal role played by the system-transcending concept of Sprachgeist. Her current project, with the working title “Creativity and Computation: a History of the Mathematical Sublime,” examines how the nexus of creativity and computation has been conceived in the history of modern mathematics and mathematics-adjacent philosophy, with an eye toward the implications of this history for contemporary concerns.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Eve Puffer
Pamela and Jack Egan Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience
Eve Puffer is the Pamela and Jack Egan Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience as well as an associate research professor at the Duke Global Health Institute. She is also an affiliate of the Center for Child and Family Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy and the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. Puffer is a global mental health researcher and a licensed clinical psychologist. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating integrated community-based interventions to promote child mental health, improve family functioning and parenting, and prevent HIV risk behavior. Her work includes studies with families with young children through those with adolescents, as well as with couples. She has conducted much of this work in rural Kenya and is an investigator on multiple studies of child mental health, family well-being and parenting interventions in Thailand, Ethiopia, Liberia, South Sudan and Iraq. Among Puffer’s primary collaborators are the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, the Women’s Institute for Secondary Education and Research in Kenya, and AMPATH, a consortium between North American medical schools and Moi University in Kenya. Dr. Puffer earned a B.S. from Furman University in 2002. She then received an M.A. in 2005 and a Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, in clinical-community psychology.
Tenure date: January 1, 2023
Amanda Randles
Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences
Amanda Randles is the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences in the Pratt School of Engineering. Her research in biomedical simulation and high-performance computing focuses on the development of new computational tools used to provide insight into the localization and development of human diseases ranging from atherosclerosis to cancer. Other appointments and affiliations include assistant professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, assistant professor of computer science and member of the Duke Cancer Institute. Randle earned her bachelor’s from Duke University in 2005 and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2013.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Craig Rawlings
Associate Professor of Sociology
Craig Rawlings is associate professor of sociology in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. From 2015-2018, he was an associate professor of instruction in sociology and the Kapnick Center for Business Institutions at Northwestern University. From 2008-2011, he was an Institute for Education Science (IES) postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). He completed his B.A. in international studies at the University of Oregon, M.A. in sociology from Rutgers University and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation research was funded by the Social Science Research Council-Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation and focused on organizational change and gender segregation in American higher education since the early 1970s. He is particularly interested in the ways that social networks and culture (shared categories, meanings, schema, etc.) reciprocally shape each other.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Daniel Scolnic
Associate Professor of Physics
Daniel Scolnic’s work has centered around the use of Type Ia supernovae in cosmology. He discovers and measures these exploding stars to understand how the universe expands and what makes up the universe, trying to help answer the questions of ‘what is dark energy’ and ‘what is dark matter.’ He received a B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 and completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 2013. He then began a KICP Fellowship and a NASA Hubble Fellowship at the University of Chicago. Scolnic began his time at Duke in 2019 and over the last four years was named a Sloan Fellow and a Packard Fellow, received a Department of Energy Early Career Program Award and received an American Astronomical Society Fred Kavli Lectureship Award.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Nicholas Stoia
Associate Professor of Music
Nicholas Stoia is the author of “Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form.” His articles appear in “Music Theory Spectrum,” the “Journal of Music Theory,” “Music Theory Online,” “Music Analysis,” the “Journal of Schenkerian Studies” and “Race and Justice.” Stoia earned his D.Phil. from City University of New York in 2008.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Michael Troxel
Associate Professor of Physics
A cosmologist and associate professor in the Department of Physics, Michael Troxel has spent the past two years as the cochair of the Science Committee in the Dark Energy Survey — an international collaboration involving 500 scientists analyzing a massive dataset of about 400 million celestial objects. He specializes in gravitational lensing, or how gravity bends the path of light and distorts images of distant galaxies. By taking large-scale images of the universe from observatories like Rubin and Roman and analyzing those distortions, he can map where dark matter is located. Through the Dark Energy Survey, Troxel and others have made such maps for about an eighth of the sky. He is looking forward to helping to build better ways to collaborate and take advantage of Roman science as inclusion chair in the Roman Weak Lensing Project Infrastructure Team. Troxel received both a B.A. and B.S. from the University of Oklahoma in 2008. He then earned an M.S. in 2011 and Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of Texas at Dallas.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Jonathan Viventi
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Jonathan Viventi is associate professor of biomedical engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering. His research uses flexible electronics to create new technology for interfacing with the brain at high resolution over large areas. These new tools can help diagnose and treat neurological disorders such as epilepsy and help improve the performance of brain machine interfaces. Viventi’s research program works closely with industry, including filing five patents and several licensing agreements. His work has also been featured as cover articles in “Science Translational Medicine” and “Nature Materials,” and has also appeared in “Nature Neuroscience,” the “Journal of Neurophysiology,” and “Brain.” Viventi’s appointments and affiliations also include associate professor of neurobiology and associate professor in neurosurgery. He is also a faculty network member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Viventi earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Alexander Volfovsky
Associate Professor of Statistical Science
Alexander Volfovsky is associate professor of statistical science in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. His research is concerned with developing theory and methodological tools for modern data streams with particular interests in high dimensional data, causal inference, and text and network analysis. With collaborators at Duke, Volfovsky has developed novel tools for collecting and analyzing network data, for extracting causal signals from high dimensional observational data, and for new approaches to implementing and analyzing complex randomized experiments. Volfovsky’s primary applied interest is in the health and social sciences with past and ongoing collaborations studying political polarization and mechanisms for reducing it and the development of treatment regimes for critically ill patients in the ICU. Volfovsky is the codirector of two interdisciplinary labs at Duke: the Polarization Lab and the Almost Matching Exactly Lab. He received a B.S. and M.S. in 2009 from The University of Chicago. He then earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2013 and completed a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Harvard University in 2016.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Kevin Welsher
Robert R. & Katherine B. Penn Associate Professor of Chemistry
Kevin Welsher is Robert R. & Katherine B. Penn Associate Professor of Chemistry in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. He develops microscopy methods allowing the visualization and measuring of never-seen-before processes happening inside and around living cells, such as viruses on the verge of attacking. Welsher was recently awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2010.
Tenure date: January 1, 2023
Julianne Werlin
Bacca Foundation Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Culture and Society
Jullianne Werlin is Bacca Foundation Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Culture and Society in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. She is a scholar of early modern England who works with sociological and demographic approaches to literary history. Her current project, “English Renaissance Literature: A Demographic History,” examines the biographies of 600 authors to show how changing patterns of life expectancy, marriage and urbanization, among others, can explain literary change over the long term. She is also interested in the intersection of economic and literary history: her first book, “Writing at the Origin of Capitalism,” showed how market centralization shaped the production and circulation of books and manuscripts. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2012.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Huanghe Yang
Associate Professor of Biochemistry
Huanghe Yang is associate professor of biochemistry in the School of Medicine. He holds additional appointments in neurobiology and cell biology. Yang’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. He earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2008.
Tenure date: March 1, 2023
Junjie Yao
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Junjie Yao is associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering. His research interests include photoacoustic tomography (PAT) technologies and translating PAT advances into diagnostic and therapeutic impact, especially in functional brain imaging and early cancer theranostics. Yao’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Saskia Ziolkowski
Associate Professor of Romance Studies
Saskia Ziolkowski is associate professor of romance studies and German studies, and core faculty in Jewish studies at Duke University. She works on Italian literature and culture from a comparative perspective. She has published on modernism, the novel, animal studies, world literature, Jewish studies, migration and issues of identity. Awarded the American Association of Italian Studies 2020 Prize in Literary Studies, her book “Kafka’s Italian Progeny” explores Franz Kafka’s sometimes surprising connections with key writers — from Massimo Bontempelli, Lalla Romano and Italo Calvino to Antonio Tabucchi, Paola Capriolo and Elena Ferrante — who have shaped Italy’s literary landscape. Ziolkowski is currently working on a monograph on Jewishness in modern Italian literature and co-directing the Global Jewish Modernism Lab. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia.
Tenure date: July 1, 2023
Main image: Jonathan Viventi stands next to books at a reception for newly tenured and promoted faculty held in the Gothic Reading Room of Duke Libraries.