Faculty Symposium
Join us for a faculty symposium that will explore the modern research university’s role in public deliberation and extending the frontiers of human knowledge.
Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center
October 5, 2017
1 – 3:30 p.m.
(open to the public)
MC: Peter Feaver
Watch The Symposium Live
A live stream of the symposium will start on Thursday, October 5, 2017 at 12:45 p.m.
The Panels
Panel I: The University and Public Deliberation
What is “public deliberation” and how do elite research universities contribute to it?
Panelists:
Philip Bennett, Moderator
D. Sunshine Hillygus
Robert Califf
Megan Mullin
Curtis Bradley
Vincent E. Price, Commentator
Panel II: The University and the Frontiers of Human Knowledge
What is the social good of “extending the frontiers of human knowledge” and what is Duke’s role?
Panelists:
Abbas Benmamoun, Moderator
Robert Lefkowitz
Thavolia Glymph
Ingrid Daubechies
Guillermo Sapiro
Xi Lian
Sally Kornbluth, Commentator
About the MC
Peter D. Feaver (Ph.D., Harvard, 1990) is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University. He is Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and Director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy. Feaver is author or co-author of several major books as well as scores of articles on grand strategy, American foreign policy, public opinion, nuclear proliferation, civil-military relations, and cybersecurity. From June 2005 to July 2007, Feaver served as Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council Staff at the White House. In 1993-94, Feaver served as Director for Defense Policy and Arms Control on the National Security Council. He is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group. He received the Duke Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award and the Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award.
About the Panelists
Abbas Benmamoun is the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement. Prior to joining Duke, Dr. Benmamoun served as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Academic Policies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He additionally served in different leadership roles at the University of Illinois, including as acting director of the Center of Middle Eastern and Asian Studies, head of the Department of Linguistics, director of the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, and Associate Provost for Faculty Development. He has also had long associations with the university’s international studies and interdisciplinary programs. A native of Morocco, Benmamoun earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, his master’s degree from University College London, and his PhD from the University of Southern California. He has served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Benmamoun’s research focuses on the comparative syntax and morphology of natural language and on heritage languages, particularly on issues of language maintenance and loss within immigrant communities.
Philip Bennett is the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies and Journalism at Duke. He has spent more than 30 years as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor and documentary film producer. He was the managing editor of The Washington Post between 2005-2009 and previously directed The Post’s international and national security coverage. He has also been managing editor of the PBS documentary series FRONTLINE. He is currently special projects editor at FRONTLINE, co-producing recent documentaries including The Choice 2016, the mini-series Divides States of America and Bannon’s War. At the Sanford School of Public Policy he leads the Rutherfurd Living History Program and teaches courses on journalism ethics, national security secrecy and the press, and journalism about war.
Curtis Bradley is the William Van Alstyne Professor of Law and a Professor of Public Policy Studies. This is his twelfth year of teaching at Duke. Before coming here, he taught at the University of Virginia and also worked in the U.S. State Department as their Counselor on International Law. He teaches and writes in the areas of U.S. foreign relations law, national security law, and constitutional law. He has published over seventy-five academic articles and a number of books, including a monograph on international law in the U.S. legal system, and his work has been widely cited by courts. Last year, he received a Carnegie Fellowship to support his project on comparative foreign relations law, which studies how constitutional democracies structure decisions about matters such as entering into and withdrawing from treaties, incorporating international law into their legal systems, and using military force.
Robert M. Califf, MD, MACC, is vice chancellor for health data science and director of the Duke Center for Health Data Science, the Donald F. Fortin, MD, Professor of Cardiology in the Duke University School of Medicine, and an advisor for Verily Life Sciences. He served as Deputy Commissioner for Medical Products and Tobacco in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2015-106, and as Commissioner of Food and Drugs from 2016-2017. A nationally and internationally recognized leader in cardiovascular medicine, health outcomes research, healthcare quality, and clinical research, Dr. Califf is a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine. Dr. Califf was the founding director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute and is one of the most frequently cited authors in biomedical science.
Ingrid Daubechies earned her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Vrije Universiteit Brussel. In addition to seminal advances in time-frequency analysis, she is best known for her breakthroughs in wavelet research and contributions to digital signal processing. Some of the wavelet bases and other computational techniques she developed were incorporated into the JPEG2000 standard for image compression. Daubechies has received a number of awards, including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics in 2000; from 2010 to 2014 she was president of the International Mathematical Union. Daubechies continues to break new ground in mathematics research, focusing on signal analysis and inverse problems, with applications ranging from fMRI and geophysics to paleontology and art conservation.
Thavolia Glymph is a professor of nineteenth century U.S. History in the Departments of History and African and African American Studies. She is the author of the prize-winning Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and, forthcoming from UNC Press, Women at War: Race Gender and Power in the Civil War. She is currently completing a book manuscript, African American Women and Children Refugees: A History of War and the Making of Freedom in the Civil War. Glymph serves as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and an elected fellow of the American Antiquarian Society and will serve as the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School in the spring of 2018.
D. Sunshine Hillygus is professor of political science and public policy. She has published widely on the topics of public opinion, political campaigns, and survey methodology, including The Hard Count: The Social and Political Challenges of the 2000 Census (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006) and The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Political Campaigns (Princeton University Press, 2008). She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the U.S. Census Bureau, the board of the American National Election Studies, and the editorial board of several leading political science journals. She is also director of the Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology (DISM), associate chair of the Duke IRB, and a faculty fellow of the Duke Alumni Association. From 2003-2009, she taught at Harvard University, where she was the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government and founding director of the Program on Survey Research. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and a BA from the University of Arkansas.
Sally Kornbluth, Ph.D. was appointed Duke University Provost on July 1, 2014. Kornbluth served as Vice Dean for Basic Science at Duke University School of Medicine from 2006-2014. In this role, she served as a liaison between the Dean’s office and the Basic Science Department Chairs and faculty, including oversight of the biomedical graduate programs in the School of Medicine, implementation of programs to support the research mission of the basic science faculty, and oversight of new and existing core laboratories. Kornbluth received a B.A. in Political Science from Williams College in 1982 and a B.S. in Genetics from Cambridge University, England in 1984 where she was a Herchel Smith Scholar at Emmanuel College. She received her Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University in 1989 in Molecular Oncology and went on to postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego. She joined the Duke faculty in 1994 and is currently the Jo Rae Wright University Professor. Kornbluth’s research interests include the study of cell proliferation and programmed cell death, areas of central importance for understanding both carcinogenesis and degenerative disorders. She has published extensively in these areas, studying these problems in a variety of model organisms.
Robert J. Lefkowitz, MD is the James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at the Duke University Medical Center. He has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1976. He is best known for his studies of G protein coupled receptors, a field which he has pioneered for 45 years. He has received numerous awards and honors for his research, including the National Medal of Science, the Shaw Prize, the Albany Prize, and the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was elected to the USA National Academy of Sciences in 1988; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983, and the Institute of Medicine in 1994.
Xi Lian is Professor of World Christianity at the Divinity School, where he teaches the history of Christianity outside the West, focusing on China and East Asia. He is the author of The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907-1932 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997) and Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (Yale University Press, 2010, winner of “Christianity Today 2011 Book Award” and Chinese Historians in the United States 2010 “Award for Academic Excellence”). His current research includes the study of Christianity among the minority peoples on the margins of Chinese society. His new book Blood Letters, a critical biography of Lin Zhao–the most important political dissident in Mao’s China–will be published by Basic Books in 2018.
Megan Mullin is Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at the Nicholas School of the Environment, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. She is a scholar of American political institutions and behavior, focusing on how political and social processes contribute to environmental outcomes. Her current areas of research are in decentralized governance, water management, and climate change politics. Mullin’s work has been published in political science, public administration, and general science journals, and she is author of Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water (MIT Press, 2009). She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and served on the faculty at Temple University prior to coming to Duke.
Guillermo Sapiro received his degrees from the Technion in Israel. After post-doctoral at MIT, he was with HP Labs and with the University of Minnesota, where he held the position of Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Vincentine Hermes-Luh Chair. He is the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr. School Professor with Duke University. G. Sapiro works on computer vision, computer graphics, medical imaging, image analysis, and machine learning. He has co-authored over 400 papers and patents and has written a book. He developed an Autism app highlighted as one of the top health apps in the Apple Store. He was awarded the Rothschild Fellowship in 1993, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) in 1998, NSF Career Award in 1999, and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship in 2010. He received the test of time award at ICCV 2011. He is a Fellow of both SIAM and IEEE and the founding E-in-C of SIAM J. Image Sciences.
