The faculty and staff of the Hart Leadership Program are pleased to announce the 2010-2011 Hart Fellows! These three outstanding Duke seniors were selected based on their strong leadership skills, their creative minds, and their proven commitment to service. For their ten-month fellowships, the Hart Fellows will be placed with innovative organizations facing complex humanitarian, political, social, or environmental issues in the developing world. The fellows will complete community-based research projects about pressing social issues that are relevant to their partner organizations, while simultaneously developing leadership capacity as they learn to navigate their new surroundings.
The Hart Fellows are:
Nanjie Caihua
Nanjie Caihua, of Tibet, who will graduate from Duke in May with a major in Cultural Anthropology. In the summer of 2007, Nanjie developed a project to introduce solar stoves to rural Tibet. With help from the Canada Fund, he was able to donate 40 solar stoves to monks in Tibet. In 2008, Nanjie was a co-recipient of both the Davis Project for Peace award and the DukeEngage Individual Project grant, the combined forces of which allowed him to return to Tibet, provide 400 solar stoves to 400 households, and conduct interviews as a means of assessing the project’s value. After being awarded the Dean’s Summer Research Fellowship and the Asian-Pacific Summer Research Grant in 2009, Nanjie researched Tibetan nomad resettlement projects in China. Nanjie was also the keynote speaker at a workshop organized by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Canada Fund in Beijing, China, in 2006. Prior to that, he managed several large Canada Fund projects dealing with solar stoves in Tibet. While at Duke, Nanjie worked in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and participated in both the Duke in Rome and Duke in New York programs. Nanjie speaks Tibetan as his native language and is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.
Nana Duffuor
Nana Duffuor, of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, who will graduate in May with a major in International Comparative Studies and minors in English and Women’s Studies. Since the summer of 2009, she has been working as the Immigrant and Diversity Outreach Intern at the North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence, where she has been co-authoring position papers on immigration reform and liaising with African immigrant and refugee organizations around the Triangle. She attended the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy’s summer training program in New York in 2008, where she learned the tools of policy research and analysis for activists. In 2007, she participated in DukeEngage in Durham, where she developed a summer program for children at the West End Community Center, and later became the service-learning assistant for the program. She has written many articles for the Chronicle, ABCNews.com, and CBSNews.com. Nana participated in the Duke in New York and Duke in Paris study abroad programs, during the latter of which she conducted research about the gender and class in the European Union. Nana speaks advanced French.
Karmel Wong
Karmel Wong, of Toronto, Canada, will graduate in May with a major in Psychology and a certificate in Children in Contemporary Society. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Psi Chi National Honor Society in Psychology. In 2007, Karmel participated in the Service Opportunities in Leadership (SOL) program, through which she conducted a community-based research project on cross-cultural friendships with the International Child Art Foundation in Washington, D.C. Upon returning to Duke, Karmel became interested in Chinese migrant issues, and in the summer of 2008 participated in the DukeEngage program at the Dandelion Migrant School in Beijing, China. In the fall of 2008, Karmel completed an independent study that investigated attachment between mothers and adopted girls from China. She returned to her hometown in the summer of 2009 to work with the Satellite Babies Project at York University, where she studied transnational parent-child dynamics in Canadian Chinese immigrant families. Currently, Karmel is writing a senior thesis that examines maternal trauma and infant attachment, and is participating on a research working group on the resettlement of Bhutanese refugees in Durham. Karmel is the president of her a cappella group, a member of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, works as the Hart Leadership Program’s staff assistant, and is fluent in French and Cantonese.