Faculty Type: Teaching on Purpose Fellows

Ryan Bouabid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Physics Department. He is a nuclear and particle experimentalist who works on detecting rare physics events. Since coming to Duke, he has been passionate about teaching. In 2020 he won the Mary Creason Memorial Award, and in 2021 he won the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. Ryan is from Morocco and immigrated to the United States at a young age.

Suhyen Bae is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. Her research explores how social isolation and loneliness affect political participation and attitudes with a focus on political extremism on social media. She is broadly interested in advancing computational social science research, also working on projects involving Twitter networks and social media campaign advertisements. She is passionate about translating her research into teaching and hopes to learn diverse pedagogical approaches to teach about emerging topics on social media and political science in a way that is relevant to students. Before coming to Duke, she received her BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations with honors and distinction from Seoul National University in South Korea.

Christina Carnes Ananias is a candidate in the Doctor of Theology program at Duke Divinity School, where her research focuses on the intersection of systematic theology and modernist visual art. Having worked with artists and students for over a decade, Christina taught various art history courses at Charleston Southern University before returning to Duke and now speaks throughout the U.S. on Christianity and the arts. In her doctoral work, she weaves together Christology, late modern philosophy, and the paintings of the French modernists. Carnes Ananias was the inaugural holder of the Bowden fellowship for theology and the visual arts at Duke. An example of her work can be found in Contemporary Art and the Church (IVP, 2017).

Josue Nataren is a PhD candidate in the Biomedical Engineering program studying the heart and developing computational models to study diseases from a multi-physics, multi-scale perspective like Fibrosis and Atrial Fibrillation. He was born and raised in El Salvador. He came to the US in 2015 to Michigan State University to get his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Biomechanics. After graduating in 2019, he started the PhD program here at Duke that same year. Josue enjoyed being an undergraduate learning assistant in his undergrad career for two years; that motivated him to seek opportunities to keep teaching. He taught a pre-college program the summer of 2022, and he is excited to keep developing his teaching skills.

Liann Tucker is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology. She is from Los Angeles, California and received her B.A. in Sociology from University of California, Davis in 2017. Her primary research areas are social network analysis and adolescence. She use network analysis to study adolescent mental health and health-risk behaviors. Other areas of her work include social network methodology and interracial victimization and friendships. In her dissertation she focuses on adolescent friendship stability, specifically the consequences of low stability and factors that are related to enduring friendships.

Richard Hall is a Ph.D. candidate in the Pratt School of Engineering, where he works in the Bridgeman Lab. His research interests include model predictive control and switched systems. Richard grew up about an hour east of Dallas in Lone Oak, TX, where he discovered a love for engineering. While studying at LeTourneau University for an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, he developed a passion for teaching. Since then, he has been pursuing a teaching career and came to Duke with that purpose in mind. Outside of school, Richard serves as a youth leader in his church, goes backpacking with his wife whenever possible, and tinkers on random projects (especially 3D printers and espresso machines).