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The Provost Faculty Fellows aims to introduce Duke faculty members to key leadership roles and responsibilities and areas of strategic focus of the university. Fellows are nominated by the deans of their respective schools or college and selected by Provost Alec D. Gallimore.
Over the course of an academic year, fellows work on a project that is either assigned to them by a sponsoring campus leader or one of their own choosing that is embraced by a campus leader. Fellows also attend meetings of Duke’s senior leadership and contribute to discussions of university issues.
2025-26 Fellows
Mark Borsuk is the James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering. His highly collaborative research, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies, concerns the development and application of mathematical models for integrating scientific information on natural, technical, and social systems. He has authored or co-authored over 95 peer-reviewed journal publications and 8 reports and book chapters.
Borsuk’s project will develop ResileLab, an open-access data and analytics sandbox designed to support interdisciplinary research, education, and policy engagement on climate and financial risk.
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Jonathan Posner is the J.P. Gibbons Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and the vice chair for research in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. A child and adolescent psychiatrist by training, he focuses his research on neurodevelopment and the origins of mental illness, with an emphasis on MRI-based studies of brain development. He serves as principal investigator on multiple NIH-funded studies and directs two NIH training programs, a postdoctoral fellowship and a physician-scientist residency program. His work has been widely published in peer-reviewed psychiatric and neuroscience journals.
Posner’s project will explore potential opportunities to enhance Duke’s research funding resilience by cultivating strategic local partnerships and strengthening interdisciplinary capacity.
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Jimmy Roberts is a Professor of Economics and has served as Chair of the Economics department since 2020. A member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, his scholarship focuses on understanding firm behavior in a wide variety of industries, including oil and gas exploration, airlines, municipal bonds, real estate and health care. He has served as an adviser and committee member for more than 40 Ph.D. students and is a Bass Fellow and recipient of the 2025 Brodhead Service Award.
Roberts’ project, which he will refine over the course of this year and complete during a second fellowship year in 2026-27, will be oriented around how the university can best allocate its financial resources to fulfill its core missions.
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Aarthi Vadde is the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of English. Her research looks at the relationship between literature, computational culture, and emerging technologies. She is the author of two books, We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0 (forthcoming in 2026) and Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe (2016), which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. She co-edited The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11th edition (2024), The Palgrave Handbook of 20th and 21st Century Literature and Science (2020), and The Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury 2019).
Vadde’s project aims to increase faculty and graduate student instructors’ awareness of neurodiversity and bring the pedagogical insights of neurodiversity and disability studies to bear on debates about what constitutes responsible AI practice in the humanities classroom.