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Faculty Type: Faculty Fellows

Rich Eva

Rich Eva is the Director of Character Forward in the Pratt School of Engineering and a Faculty Fellow in the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Eva earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Baylor University and his A.B., cum laude, from Princeton University. He publishes on topics in ethics, pedagogy, and political philosophy, and he teaches courses on technology ethics and politics.

Character Forward is an ethics initiative, supported by The Purpose Project at Duke, focused on making character essential to engineering excellence at Duke and beyond. To that end, Eva works with faculty, staff, and students to equip them to address ethics and character formation in their classrooms and lives. The goal is to produce engineering leaders of character who leverage technology for the good of humanity.

Eva’s interest in leadership and character was sparked by his experience as a Division I athlete at Princeton, as well as his work as an assistant vice president at Barclays Bank in New York City, where he helped organize pro bono service initiatives before returning to academia to investigate questions in applied ethics.

Rebecca Vidra

Rebecca Vidra is a Senior Lecturer of Marine Conservation and Ethics at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Her work examines the interstitial spaces between ecological and cultural restoration, science and ethics, and hope and despair. As a restoration ecologist, she engages with community organizations to understand how restoring ecosystems can also restore social capital and cultural traditions. Rebecca teaches a range of courses at the Nicholas School of the Environment, including the undergraduate capstone experience, and writes about teaching challenges for Inside Higher Ed. She leads a Bass Connections team, Advancing equity in coastal and marine restoration and mentors students who seek to engage with community partners in ethical and practical ways.

Rebecca formerly served as the Director of the Duke Environmental Leadership Program and is part of the leadership team for Oceans@Duke, a multi-school effort to address the most pressing ocean challenges.

Erika Weinthal

Dr. Weinthal specializes in global environmental politics and environmental security with a particular emphasis on water and energy. Current areas of research include (1) global environmental politics and governance, (2) environmental conflict and peacebuilding, (3) the political economy of the resource curse, and (4) climate change adaptation. Dr. Weinthal’s research spans multiple geographic regions, including the Soviet successor states, the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa, and North America. Dr. Weinthal is author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia (MIT Press 2002), which received the 2003 Chadwick Alger Prize and the 2003 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize. She has co-authored Oil is not a Curse (Cambridge University Press 2010) and co-edited Water and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding (Earthscan Press, 2014) and The Oxford Handbook on Water Politics and Policy (Oxford University Press 2018). She is a member of the UNEP Expert Group on Conflict and Peacebuilding and a co-editor of Global Environmental Politics. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015”.

Gopal Sreenivasan

Gopal Sreenivasan (Ph.D. 1993, UC Berkeley) joined the Duke faculty in 2008. His research interests cover a wide range of topics across the whole spectrum of moral and political philosophy.

Sreenivasan’s recent book, Emotion and virtue (Princeton, 2020), makes original contributions in both moral psychology and the theory of virtue.

Ann Saterbak

Ann Saterbak is director of the Duke Engineering First-Year Experience and a professor of the practice in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. She is a nationally recognized engineering educator with a focus on creating undergraduate programs that broaden students problem solving skills through real-world problems, inquiry-based learning, and hands-on experiences. In fall 2017, she launched a new hands-on design course for first-year Pratt students.

Before coming to Duke, she was the associate dean for engineering education and full teaching professor in bioengineering in the George R. Brown School of Engineering at Rice University. At Rice, she launched a successful first-year engineering design course in which students solved community-based, client-driven problems and built physical prototypes. Her outstanding teaching at Rice was recognized by four university-wide teaching awards. She is the lead author of the textbook Bioengineering Fundamentals.

For her contribution to education within biomedical engineering, she was elected a fellow in the Biomedical Engineering Society and the American Society of Engineering Education. Saterbak has been a frequent presenter of educational materials at annual ASEE and BMES conferences. In building the undergraduate bioengineering laboratory at Rice, she applied four years of industry experience working at the Shell Development Company.