Tyson Brown Named Director of Cook Center

Brown succeeds economist William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr., the center’s founding director

Tyson Brown at the podium
Tyson Brown becomes director on July 1.

Tyson Brown, a professor of sociology and associate professor in medicine, has been appointed director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University effective July 1, Provost Alec D. Gallimore announced.

Brown succeeds the Cook Center’s founding director, William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr., the Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and professor of African & African American studies and economics.

Established in 2015, the Cook Center is a scholarly collaborative that studies the causes and consequences of inequality and develops remedies for these disparities and their adverse effects. Its name honors Samuel DuBois Cook, a scholar, teacher, and activist who was the first Black faculty member hired and tenured at Duke. A distinguished political scientist, Cook went on to become president of Dillard University and a Duke trustee.

“I congratulate Tyson Brown on this new appointment and thank Sandy Darity for his decade of leadership and dedication to advancing our understanding of inequality and how to address it,” Gallimore said. “The Cook Center will remain a vital hub for research and scholarship at Duke in the groundbreaking tradition of its namesake.”

Brown, who joined the Duke faculty in 2016, integrates innovative theoretical frameworks with advanced data science and statistical methods to understand the causes and consequences of racial inequality. His research examines structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequality and has appeared in leading journals across sociology, demography, gerontology, public health, and health policy. His scholarly contributions have been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association and Duke University, and his work has included interdisciplinary collaborations with scholars across the country, including through engagement with the National Academies.

An executive core faculty member at the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy, Brown has also served as director of the Center on Health & Society and faculty leader of the Bass Connections Race and Society theme, both of which are part of Duke’s Social Science Research Institute.

In 2021, President Vincent E. Price named Brown the recipient of the inaugural Presidential Fellowship, a one-year program designed to prepare promising mid-career faculty members for future leadership roles and to engage them in the administration of the university.  He has also served for the past two years on the Executive Committee of Duke’s Academic Council.

“It’s a tremendous honor to direct the Cook Center,” Brown said.  “I look forward to building on the extraordinary leadership of Sandy Darity, and to working with a broad and expanding community of faculty and students across Duke’s schools and disciplines. Together, we will deepen our understanding of the root causes of social disparities and advance evidence-based approaches to achieving equity.”

A pioneering economist and renowned scholar of racial inequity, Darity joined the Duke faculty in 1999. He has published or edited 14 books and published more than 300 scholarly articles.

His book with A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020, UNC Press), and well as his latest co-edited volume, The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (2023, University of California Press) have established him as a leading authority on reparations for Black American descendants of slavery.

Darity was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences earlier this year and was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2024, an honor that fewer than 200 economists have received since it was established in 1965.

In addition to leading the Cook Center, he served as chair of the Department of African & African American Studies from 2011-14 and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke.