Welcome to these six new faculty members, appointed in the 2023-2024 school year.
Vicki Bogan
Economist Vicki L. Bogan is a new Sanford professor and faculty affiliate in the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. Bogan's area of specialization is family finance and financial decision-making. She is particularly interested in behavioral finance, which examines how psychological influences affect financial decision-making. Bogan comes to Duke from Cornell, where she was the Geller Family Professor of Applied Economics and Policy. She also directed the Institute for Behavioral and Household Finance.
Robyn Caplan
Robyn Caplan is a new assistant professor. She is also a Senior Lecturing Fellow in the Center for Science & Society at Duke; a Researcher Affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she worked as a Senior Researcher; an Affiliate at the Center for Information Technology and Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, and a founding member of the Platform Governance Research Network. She received her PhD from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, and she conducts research at the intersection of platform governance and media policy.
Sebastian James
A former Senior Economist at the World Bank is a new Professor of the Practice. Sebastian James initially trained as an engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. He went on to study international tax at Harvard Law School and earn a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Over the past 15 years in his career at the World Bank, he has traveled to 86 countries, supporting more than 45 of them on tax reform. James said his favorite part of his job at the World Bank was working with government officials, trying to solve the puzzle of designing fair taxation systems and collecting taxes.
Shelley Liu
New Assistant Professor Shelley Liu brings her study of post-war development to Sanford. A political scientist, she will teach the core class in Globalization and Governance at the master’s level, as well as courses in political violence, civil war, and the politics of development in the Global South. Liu’s research focuses on how conflict affects development, institutional weakness, and citizen trust in the state in polarized political contexts. From Sanford, she will continue examining the legacies of political violence, political polarization and misinformation, and statebuilding. Her first book, Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding, is forthcoming at Oxford University Press.
Katie Rosanbalm
Katie Rosanbalm has been appointed Associate Research Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy after being a part of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP) since 2004. Trained as a child clinical psychologist, Rosanbalm’s work focuses on program implementation and evaluation in the areas of self-regulation development, trauma-informed early care and education, and child welfare. Rosanbalm earned earn her master’s and doctorate degrees in child clinical psychology from Ohio University before coming to Duke in 2004.
Jonathan Stromseth
Jonathan Stromseth is a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings where he holds a joint appointment in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and John L. Thornton China Center. From February 2017 to June 2023, he held the Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asian Studies. Stromseth has broad experience as a policymaker, scholar, and development practitioner. From 2014 to 2017, he served on the secretary of state’s policy planning staff, advising the State Department’s leadership on China, Southeast Asia, and East Asian and Pacific affairs. In January 2024 he will join our faculty as a professor of the practice of public policy.