Duke ID Lab

Congrats to our amazing PI Dr Gaither on being a finalist for the Judith Deckers Prize in Undergraduate Teaching!

“By embedding equity into every facet of her teaching and dismantling barriers to participation, she is not only shaping students’ trajectories but also redefining what undergraduate education can achieve at its best.”

Duke community identifies 11 Judith Deckers Prize finalists | Office of Undergraduate Education Duke University’s Judith Deckers Prize honors excellence in undergraduate teaching. Finalists are identified through an open nomination process each spring, in which stud

The Cook Center featured one of our amazing undergraduates recently! Way to go, Olivia!

💜🩵 54 messages of hope—and an important reminder that sometimes the hardest conversations are the ones we most need to have.

So proud of our lab for representing DukeLine (our peer texting mental health service led by Nancy Zucker) with DuWell in raising awareness for World Su***de Prevention Month and World Su***de Prevention Day.

Students stopped by to share 54 messages of hope and encouragement for others, including:

“The world is better with you in it.”
“You are loved and needed here.”
“Your progress is seen.”

Students also picked up purple and teal elephants, representing the “elephant in the room” and the importance of making mental health something we can talk about openly, along with bracelets and make-your-own aromatherapy sprays. We took our belonging work outside of the lab!

Today’s Social Identities class was pawsitively good for our self-esteem. 🐾

We had a very special visitor from Dr. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods’ Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University while talking about self-esteem, identity, and the social forces that shape how we see ourselves.

I’m not sure “puppy affection” appears in the self-esteem literature as an intervention, but based on today’s extremely rigorous classroom observations, I think we may have a significant effect. 😂

And yes, the professor may have benefited most. 🐶💙

Excited to see DukeLine (our peer mental health texting program led by Nancy Zucker and Dr Gaither) featured as one of four new faculty-led research initiatives funded by Duke Trinity College of Arts & Sciences! 🎉

Our interdisciplinary team is using 1,500+ hours of anonymized peer-support conversations to ask a deceptively simple question: What actually makes someone feel seen, heard, and supported?

By bringing together psychology, clinical science, qualitative methods, and computational modeling, we hope to better understand the science of human connection—and use it to strengthen peer support and student mental health.

Very excited for what comes next! 💙

Trinity Funds Four New Faculty-Led Research Initiatives The increased support for early-stage interdisciplinary research is bolstering efforts in biodiversity, statistics, mental health, philosophy, cultural heritage and more.

After three years in our lab, Esha Naidu is heading to Wake Forest to work with Eranda Jayawickreme, and while this is excellent news for them, it is considerably less excellent news for us!

Esha has been a fantastic colleague, problem-solver, and all-around lab citizen. Esha, thanks for putting up with us for three years. We’re excited to see what you do next, and we expect regular updates!

Ending the summer the best way we know how: with lots of research posters! ☀️📊🧠

We’re celebrating Sadaf and Madelyn as they wrap up their UROP summer with the lab! Sadaf joined us from Wake Tech, exploring biracial Black maternal socialization, while Madelyn joined us from Meredith College, studying multiracial Asian identity denial experiences. We’ve loved having them in the lab and getting to see their projects come together!

And because apparently we can never have too many posters… Julia added a bonus one at Duke’s Summer Research Symposium, sharing her work on data visualization and threat! 🎉

New lab publication! This is a new interdisciplinary paper with Monica Garcia-Perez and Sandy Darity examining the relationships among familial incarceration history, race, household wealth, and FICO credit scores.

Using data from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC), we found that familial incarceration history was associated with both lower wealth accumulation and lower credit scores, with particularly large disparities for Black households. The findings add to growing evidence that credit scores reflect broader structural inequalities rather than functioning as race-neutral indicators.

A special thank you to my amazing lab team, who spent many hours conducting the phone interviews that made this work possible!

Read it here:

academic.oup.com

The lab helped out at the Durham County Sheriff’s Office Back-To-School resource fair this past weekend! We got to meet so many families!

Research question: Can repeated ice cream outings postpone the start of the semester?

Results: No.

Conclusion: More ice cream is needed to confirm these findings. 🍨

One month until classes begin, so we took time to “scoop” up a little summer before the semester gets underway. 🍦