Duke University Adds Six Women to Its Faculty

Duke University has added a number of new faculty members this fall. Here are brief profiles of six women who recently have joined the Duke faculty.

Rachel Brewster was appointed professor of law. She also will serve as co-director of Duke’s Center for International and Comparative Law. She was an assistant professor of law and an affiliated faculty member of the Weatherford Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Dr. Brewster is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Virginia School of Law. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina.

Nita Farahany is a professor at Duke Law School and holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Law and a research professor at Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. She previously taught at Vanderbilt University.

Professor Farahany is a graduate of Dartmouth College. She holds a master’s degree, a juris doctorate, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University.

Elizabeth Grosz is the Jean Fox O’Barr Professor in Interdisciplinary Feminist Studies at Duke. She comes to Duke from Rutgers University, where she worked in the women’s and gender studies department from 2002 to 2012. She is the author of Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics and Art (Duke University Press 2011).

Professor Grosz holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sydney. She has taught at Monash University in Melbourne and the State University of New York at Buffalo

Maiken H. Mikkelsen is a new assistant professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering. Her research is focused on building the next generation of computers.

Dr. Mikkelsen is a graduate of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara.

Eve Puffer was hired as an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience. She will begin teaching in the Spring semester.

Dr. Puffer is a magna cum laude graduate of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical-community psychology from the University of South Carolina and completed her clinical internship in pediatric psychology at Duke University Medical Center.

Jenny Tung is an assistant professor in the department of evolutionary anthropology. Dr. Tung graduated from Duke University in 2003. She completed her Ph.D. at Duke in 2010 studying the wild baboon population of the Amboseli basin in Kenya with a focus on determining the relationship between the animals’ genes and their behaviors. She then conducted postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago.