Giving

Duke attracts interdisciplinary scholars who break conventions, collaborate across boundaries and together prove that no goal is too ambitious.

Named endowed professorships create a significant advantage in both recruitment and retention. Each new named professorship can make a powerful impact as Duke competes for the most sought-after boundary-crossing faculty. We have used strategic funding for recruitment to attract some of world’s most dynamic interdisciplinary scholars — the Duke Science and Technology hiring efforts being just one recent example. One of our priorities is to endow at least ten new faculty chairs for scholars who excel at interdisciplinary research and teaching, split between distinguished chairs for superlative senior scholars, and chairs for emerging scholars who focus on community-engaged research and teaching. Your philanthropic investment can ensure that Duke maintains its capacity to explore the most vital questions and issues.

Full Professor

Your gift of $3.5 million can establish a full professorship in partnership with one of Duke’s schools, empowering us to recruit and retain accomplished thought leaders in key areas like climate resilience and computational neuroscience. These renowned senior scholars drive our academic reputation, elevate our research programs and provide a transformational education to our undergraduate and graduate students. 

For a gift of $5 million, you can establish a full professorship as well as a companion research fund of $1.5 million, providing perpetual support for your named professor’s research advances and making the endowed position even more valuable.

Assistant/Associate Professor

Duke’s approach to interdisciplinarity emphasizes the need to provide scaffolding for effective collaboration, including partnerships with community organizations and policymakers. Your gift of $2 million can endow an assistant/associate professorship, supporting the work of emerging scholars who excel at collaboration beyond campus borders, and who understand the value of enduring partnerships and the development of research agendas that meet community-defined priorities.

Your gift of $1.5 million can establish an endowed executive-in-residence position to support the recruitment of accomplished mid-career professionals who bridge the gap between academia and the business, nonprofit and government sectors, providing students with real-world insights and leading applied research experiences.

Across campus, interdisciplinary research teams leverage internal seed funding to advance their collaborations, strengthen proposals for longer-term external grants, inform public decision-making and generate startups. 

The provost’s Multiyear Interdisciplinary Hubs program, for example, offers an important means of refreshing Duke’s interdisciplinary ecosystem. Each Hub receives major financial support to cross-school faculty groups that tackle major issues, like the application of AI to the assessment of healthcare interventions, and integrate cutting-edge research with inquiry-based education. 

Another recent seed grant program for research teams has focused on environmental justice in the Carolinas, in collaboration with community partners.

Your expendable gift of $500,000 or more can support our ambitious faculty to jump-start their collective endeavors.

Duke’s summer +Programs offer immersive, hand-on, team-based learning experiences across a variety of fields, including the arts, climate, computer and data science, documentary studies, applied ethics, history and math. These experiences deepen and clarify intellectual passions and equip students to collaborate, communicate and navigate the ambiguity that accompanies complex projects. Your expendable gift of $150,000 can ensure that students who receive financial aid have access to these transformative experiences.