Duke ID Lab

10/09/2026

Dr. Gaither’s Self and Social Identities course is featured in this Duke piece alongside other faculty who are teaching students about identity—how it develops, changes, intersects, and shapes how we see ourselves and others.

Grateful to be part of a Duke community making space for these conversations. 💙

Across Duke classrooms, Blue Devils lean into a liberal arts education by asking how identities are formed, how they change and whose stories are told.

10/06/2026

The lab went international this past weekend in Montreal at SESP!

Dr. Gaither led a symposium focused on new work that pushes intergroup processes to consider more than just the commonly studied white/Black binary and Dr Naidu gave a talk on her work with gestures improving in*******al interactions!

09/28/2026

Welcoming fall, lab-style: hot chocolate, cookies, and a little friendly trivia competition! 🍪🧠

A fun excuse to trade research questions for trivia questions and spend some time together outside our usual lab routine.

Very grateful for this crew and a cozy start to the season! 🍁

09/24/2026

Congrats to our amazing PI Dr Gaither on being a finalist for the Judith Deckers Prize in Undergraduate Teaching!

“By embedding equity into every facet of her teaching and dismantling barriers to participation, she is not only shaping students’ trajectories but also redefining what undergraduate education can achieve at its best.”

Duke University’s Judith Deckers Prize honors excellence in undergraduate teaching. Finalists are identified through an open nomination process each spring, in which stud

09/21/2026

The Cook Center featured one of our amazing undergraduates recently! Way to go, Olivia!

09/17/2026

💜🩵 54 messages of hope—and an important reminder that sometimes the hardest conversations are the ones we most need to have.

So proud of our lab for representing DukeLine (our peer texting mental health service led by Nancy Zucker) with DuWell in raising awareness for World Su***de Prevention Month and World Su***de Prevention Day.

Students stopped by to share 54 messages of hope and encouragement for others, including:

“The world is better with you in it.”
“You are loved and needed here.”
“Your progress is seen.”

Students also picked up purple and teal elephants, representing the “elephant in the room” and the importance of making mental health something we can talk about openly, along with bracelets and make-your-own aromatherapy sprays. We took our belonging work outside of the lab!

09/09/2026

Today’s Social Identities class was pawsitively good for our self-esteem. 🐾

We had a very special visitor from Dr. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods’ Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University while talking about self-esteem, identity, and the social forces that shape how we see ourselves.

I’m not sure “puppy affection” appears in the self-esteem literature as an intervention, but based on today’s extremely rigorous classroom observations, I think we may have a significant effect. 😂

And yes, the professor may have benefited most. 🐶💙

09/02/2026

Excited to see DukeLine (our peer mental health texting program led by Nancy Zucker and Dr Gaither) featured as one of four new faculty-led research initiatives funded by Duke Trinity College of Arts & Sciences! 🎉

Our interdisciplinary team is using 1,500+ hours of anonymized peer-support conversations to ask a deceptively simple question: What actually makes someone feel seen, heard, and supported?

By bringing together psychology, clinical science, qualitative methods, and computational modeling, we hope to better understand the science of human connection—and use it to strengthen peer support and student mental health.

Very excited for what comes next! 💙

The increased support for early-stage interdisciplinary research is bolstering efforts in biodiversity, statistics, mental health, philosophy, cultural heritage and more.

08/17/2026

After three years in our lab, Esha Naidu is heading to Wake Forest to work with Eranda Jayawickreme, and while this is excellent news for them, it is considerably less excellent news for us!

Esha has been a fantastic colleague, problem-solver, and all-around lab citizen. Esha, thanks for putting up with us for three years. We’re excited to see what you do next, and we expect regular updates!

08/13/2026

Ending the summer the best way we know how: with lots of research posters! ☀️📊🧠

We’re celebrating Sadaf and Madelyn as they wrap up their UROP summer with the lab! Sadaf joined us from Wake Tech, exploring biracial Black maternal socialization, while Madelyn joined us from Meredith College, studying multiracial Asian identity denial experiences. We’ve loved having them in the lab and getting to see their projects come together!

And because apparently we can never have too many posters… Julia added a bonus one at Duke’s Summer Research Symposium, sharing her work on data visualization and threat! 🎉