Who We are
A vibrant interdisciplinary community of scholars, students, and practitioners dedicated to understanding the moral challenges of our time and creating scholarly frameworks, policy, and practice to address them.
- Doriane Coleman
Doriane Coleman
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Professor of Law, Duke Law School
Doriane Coleman is a Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where she specializes in interdisciplinary scholarship focused on women, children, medicine, sports, and law. Her recent work has centered on sex, including its evolving definition and its implications for institutions ranging from elite sport to medicine and, of course, to law. A first article in this series, Sex in Sport , is at 80 LAW & CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS 63-126 (2017), and a second, Re-affirming the Value of the Sports Exception to Title IX's General Non-Discrimination Rule, is at 27 DUKE J. GENDER L. & POL’Y 69 (2020). She is currently working on a third article on Sex in Medicine and a book project called Sex in Law.
A regular teacher of Torts, Coleman is co-author of the first-year casebook Torts: Doctrine and Process (2019). She is also co-director of the Law School’s Center for Sports Law and Policy, a faculty affiliate of the University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and the History of Medicine, and the Center for Child and Family Policy. Her recent cross-campus projects include co-leading a Bass Connections team on Cheating, Gaming, and Rule Fixing: Challenges for Ethics Across the Adversarial Professions (2018-19), and directing the program Head Trauma in Football: Implications for Medicine, Law, and Policy (2018).
Coleman received her Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown Law (1988), and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University (1982). She was a litigation associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering before beginning her academic and teaching career at Howard University School of Law. While she was at Wilmer, she worked on the development of the world’s first random, out-of-competition drug-testing program for what is now USA Track & Field, a project which led to her years-long engagement with the Olympic Movement’s anti-doping efforts.
Before law school, Coleman ran the 800 meters in collegiate and international competition, where she was a multiple All American, All East, and All Ivy athlete, the U.S. National Collegiate Indoor Champion in 1982, the U.S. National Indoor Champion (with teammates) in the 4 x 400 meters relay in 1982, and the Swiss National Champion in 1982 and 1983. Over her athletic career she competed for Villanova, Cornell, the Swiss and U.S. National Teams, Athletics West, the Santa Monica and Atoms Track Clubs, and Lausanne Sports.
Read her "Good Question" - Should healthy minor children be used as organ donors for their ill siblings?
dlc@law.duke.edu
919-613-7075
CONTACT ME - Joseph Augustus Jackson, MD
Joseph Augustus Jackson, MD
Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Associate Professor of Pediatrics; Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Advisory Dean for MD Program
- Adriane Lentz-Smith
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Associate Professor in the Department of History
Adriane Lentz-Smith's interests lie in African American history, twentieth-century United States history, and the history of the U.S. and the world. Her 2009 book Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I looks at the black freedom struggle in the World War I years, with a particular focus on manhood, citizenship, and global encounters. More recently, she has been at work on a book tentatively entitled Afterlives: Sagon Penn, State Violence, and the Twilight of Civil Rights. The book looks at dramatic moments of violent encounters between African Americans and the police to explore the role of violence in sustaining and opposing white supremacy in the two decades following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She is also interested in how African Americans engaged the world in the age of Cold War civil rights, and how their participation in the project of U.S. state and empire set the horizons of their freedom struggles.
adriane.lentz-smith@duke.edu
CONTACT ME
919-684-2837 - Wayne Norman
Wayne Norman
Mike and Ruth Mackowski Professor of Ethics in the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Department of Philosophy
Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Wayne Norman is the Mike and Ruth Mackowski Professor of Ethics in the Kenan Institute for Ethics and the Department of Philosophy at Duke University. He is a political philosopher who also teaches courses in business ethics, sports ethics, and the philosophy of play and humor. His work in political philosophy focuses mostly on the special challenges that arise in multicultural societies where citizens have diverse and overlapping identities and attachments. He has been most interested in states that incorporate more than one people or nation with its own historic homeland (as more than 90% of countries do). He is the author of Negotiating Nationalism: Nation-building, Federalism, and Secession in the Multinational State and co-editor or author of four other books. And he is currently writing a book entitled The Ethical Adversary: How to play fair when you’re playing to win – in sports, business, politics, law, and love. Before arriving at Duke almost 13 years ago he held distinguished professorships at the Université de Montréal and the University of British Columbia.
wayne.norman@duke.edu
CONTACT ME
919-660-3190
102 West Duke Building
Box 90432
Durham, NC 27708 - Deondra Rose
Deondra Rose
Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Associate Professor, Sanford School of Public Policy
Deondra Rose is an Associate Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy with secondary appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Department of History. She is also the Director of Polis: Center for Politics and Co-director of the North Carolina Scholars Strategy Network (SSN). Her research focuses on the feedback effects of landmark social policies on the American political landscape. In addition to U.S. public/social policy, Rose's research and teaching interests include higher education policy, American political development (APD), political behavior, identity politics (e.g., gender, race, and socioeconomic status), and inequality.
She is the author of Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2018), which examines the development of landmark U.S. higher education policies--including the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the Higher Education Act of 1965, and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments--and their impact on the progress that women have made since the mid-twentieth century.
Rose's research has appeared in Studies in American Political Development, the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, and PS: Political
- Charmaine Royal
Charmaine Royal
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Biology, Community & Family Medicine
Charmaine Royal is the Robert O. Keohane Professor of African & African American Studies, Biology, Global Health, and Family Medicine & Community Health at Duke University. She directs the Duke Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference and the Duke Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.
Dr. Royal’s research, scholarship, and teaching focus on ethical, social, scientific, and clinical implications of human genetics and genomics, particularly issues at the intersection of genetics and "race". Her specific interests and primary areas of work include genetics and genomics in African and African Diaspora populations; sickle cell disease and trait; public and professional perspectives and practices regarding "race", ethnicity, and ancestry; genetic ancestry inference; and genotype-environment interplay. A fundamental aim of her work is to dismantle ideologies and systems of racial hierarchy in science, healthcare, and society. She serves on numerous national and international advisory boards and committees for government agencies, professional organizations, research initiatives, not-for-profit entities, and corporations.
Dr. Royal obtained a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, master’s degree in genetic counseling, and doctorate in human genetics from Howard University. She completed postgraduate training in ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) research and bioethics at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and in epidemiology and behavioral medicine at Howard University Cancer Center.
CONTACT ME - Ann Saterbak
Ann Saterbak
Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Professor of the Practice, Department of Biomedical Engineering
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.
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics
Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is the Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. He has worked on ethics (theoretical, applied, and empirical), philosophy of law, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and informal logic. He has received fellowships from the Harvard Program in Ethics and the Professions, the Princeton Center for Human Values, the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University, and the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sinnott-Armstrong is co-director of MADLab at the Kenan Institute for Ethics and has served as the co-director of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project and co-investigator at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics.
He is the author of Morality Without God? and Moral Skepticisms, editor of Moral Psychology, volumes I-III, and has published articles in a variety of philosophical, scientific, and popular journals and collections. His most recent book, Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, discusses the benefits that sound, fair arguments grounded in mutual understanding can have. His MOOC course of the same name, offered through Coursera, has attracted more than 900,000 registered students from over 150 countries.Sinnott-Armstrong earned his BA from Amherst College and his PhD from Yale University. His current work is on moral psychology and brain science as well as the uses of neuroscience in legal systems.ws66@duke.edu
CONTACT ME
919-660-3172
102 West Duke Building
Box 90743
Durham, NC 27708 - Sim Sitkin
Sim Sitkin
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Michael W. Krzyzewski University Professor of Leadership; Professor of Management; Professor of Public Policy; Faculty Director, Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics; Director, Behavioral Science and Policy Center
Sim B. Sitkin is Michael W. Krzyzewski University Professor of Leadership, Professor of Management and Public Policy, and founding Faculty Director of the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics (COLE) at the Fuqua School of Business, and Director of the Behavioral Science and Policy Center at Duke University. Since joining Duke in 1994, he served at various times as Area Head for the Management and Organizations Department, Faculty Director of Fuqua’s Health Sector Management Program, and Academic Director at Duke Corporate Education.
Sitkin’s research focuses on leadership and control systems and their influence on how organizations and their members become more or less capable of change and innovation. He is widely known for his research on the effect of formal and informal organizational control systems and leadership on risk taking, accountability, trust, learning, M&A processes, and innovation. His research has appeared in a leading academic and practice-oriented journals. His most recent books are Organizational Control (2010), The Six Domains of Leadership (2016) and Routledge Companion to Trust (2017). He is President of the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, Founding Editor of Behavioral Science and Policy, Consulting Editor of Science You Can Use, Advisory Board Member of the Journal of Trust Research, and Advisory Board for the Routledge Book Series on Trust, having previously served as Editor of the Academy of Management Annals, Senior Editor of Organization Science and Associate Editor of the Journal of Organizational Behavior. He has extensive consulting and executive education experience with corporations, non-profits, and government organizations worldwide. In this work, he has focused on strategic leadership, leading and managing change (including mergers and acquisitions), organizational trust, learning and knowledge management, and the design of organizational control systems.
CONTACT ME - Patrick Smith
Patrick Smith
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Associate Research Professor of Theological Ethics and Bioethics, Duke Divinity School. Associate Faculty, Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and the History of Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine
Professor Smith works at the intersection of social ethics, moral philosophy, and theological bioethics. More particularly, his specific academic interests are in the areas of end-of-life care, palliative care ethics, and ethically addressing issues surrounding health and health care disparities. His work and service in bioethics and social ethics has spanned academic, professional, and community spaces.
Before coming to Duke, Professor Smith held an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School through the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He was core faculty for the Master of Bioethics degree program offered through Harvard’s Center for Bioethics. In addition to his work with the Center for Bioethics, he was a principal faculty member for the Initiative on Health, Religion, and Spirituality, an interfaculty initiative across Harvard University.
Professor Smith has worked professionally as the ethics coordinator for Angela Hospice Care Center in Livonia, Mich. He served on the Ethics Advisory Council for the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, on the board for the Hospice Palliative Care Association of Michigan, as a member of Boston Children’s Hospital’s ethics committee, and on the Board of Directors for the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
Professor Smith’s communal and ecclesial work has included service on the board of directors of organizations working for the common good and more equitable social arrangements such as YW Boston, which aims to empower women and eliminate racism. He also contributed thought leadership by serving on the board of a community development corporation, which supports local communities through building affordable housing, engaging in advocacy work, and providing education on housing policies and practices in Mass.
CONTACT MEpsmith@div.duke.edu
919-660-3421
Duke Box 90968 - Gopal Sreenivasan
Gopal Sreenivasan
Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Professor of Philosophy; Crown University Distinguished Professor in Ethics; Professor in Medicine
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.
- David Toole
David Toole
Director, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Senior Research Fellow, Divinity School and Arts & Sciences; Associate Professor of the Practice of Theology, Ethics, and Global Health, Duke Divinity School
David Toole is director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Associate Professor of the Practice of Theology, Ethics, and Global Health. He earned his PhD at Duke in 1996 and then left for his home state of Montana, where he taught at Carroll College and the University of Montana before returning to Duke in 2005. In 2009, he started traveling back and forth from Duke to communities in the Great Lakes region of East Africa while working on grant projects and conducting research in Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan. His work in Africa led his to pursue an MPH degree from UNC, Chapel Hill, which he completed in 2014. His teaching includes courses on Global Health as an Ethical Enterprise, Ethics and the History of Humanitarianism, Challenges of Living an Ethical Life, and Ethics and Native America. He is the author of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, and has recently completed a manuscript titled The Morgue in the Garden of Eden: An Essay on Hope … in the Dark, which tells the story of a Burundian woman and the hospital she founded during Burundi’s long civil war. David has been married to his wife, Nancy, for thirty-four years and is the father of three grown boys.
dtoole@div.duke.edu
CONTACT ME - Stephen Vaisey
Stephen Vaisey
Senior Fellow and Director of Worldview Lab, Kenan Institute for Ethics; Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Professor of Sociology
Stephen Vaisey’s research focuses on where people get their ideas about what a “good life” looks like and what it means to be a “good person,” and to determine how this shapes the choices they make. Most generally, he examines why people do the things they do, and figures out the role of culture and cognition in explaining human behavior. He has also conducted research on 1970s communes, religion, and marijuana use, educational overqualification, gene-environment interactions, and the relationship between poverty and educational aspirations, among other topics.
He is director of the Worldview Lab at the Kenan Institute, an interdisciplinary collaborative research group that brings together faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduate students to work on shared empirical projects. Worldview Lab's main goal is to better understand diversity in values, goals, and worldviews both internationally and within contemporary American society.
Stephen earned a BA in French and a BS in sociology from Brigham Young University, and an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
vaisey@soc.duke.edu
CONTACT ME
919-660-5635 - Erika Weinthal
Erika Weinthal
Faculty Advisory Council, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy
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”.