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Chloe Nguyen: 2024 Terry Sanford Leadership Award Winner
Chloe Nguyen is one of two winners of the 2024 Terry Sanford Leadership Award. A public policy major and psychology minor, Chloe nabbed the award in part due to her efforts to better understand the psychological drivers of intergroup conflict like political polarization and to develop interventions to address them. She has led numerous projects in this area. For example, with Polis, Sanford's Center for Politics, she developed a pilot program and classroom teaching materials to help improve political discourse on college campuses. Her ideas are based in psychology research.
She also worked with a group focused on depolarization, Braver Angels and Duke’s Polis: Center for Politics to hold debates at Duke University on controversial topics – again, an effort to help address polarization. She focused her honors thesis on polarization as well, and says that her thesis "Consuming Hate: The Use of Affectively Polarizing Rhetoric in National Television News Commentary on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC" explores how media rhetoric and identity–rather than simple political difference–may drive partisan division in the US.
In addition to her political polarization work, Chloe was a writer for The Ninth Street Journal. She was awarded the 2024 Fischer-Zernin award for local student journalism for an investigative story she wrote, ‘No one came around for days: Senior and disabled residents describe a harrowing 35-hour Christmas blackout about an electricity outage at a Durham, North Carolina senior apartment complex.
Chloe is also president and founder of the Duke Justice Project, an organization working to reduce mass incarceration and assist people who are formerly incarcerated with re-entry.
After graduation, Chloe will head to Ireland. She won the 2024 Mitchell Scholarship which funds a year of graduate study in that country. After that, she plans to focus on technology, privacy and internet law.