Devon Noonan, PhD

Devon Noonan is the Associate Dean for Community Engagement Science and Director of Rural Health Equity at Duke School of Nursing.

She is a nationally recognized expert in prevention science, community engagement, rural public health, and advocacy to improve health and prevent disease in rural communities.

Dr. Noonan’s research program utilizes principles of community engagement to develop and implement health behavior change interventions in rural communities, aiming to significantly decrease chronic disease risk. The majority of these interventions focus on tobacco cessation.

Jessica Sperling, PhD

Jessica Sperling serves as the Director of Applied Research, Evaluation, & Engagement in Duke University’s Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) as well as the Office of Evaluation and Applied Research Partnership, a partnership between the Duke Clinical and Translational Research Institute (CTSI) and SSRI. She also directs the Evaluation, Improvement, and Impact area at the CTSI.

Dr. Sperling is a mixed-methods applied researcher and evaluator dedicated to informing and improving initiatives through responsive and collaborative research, evaluation, and research/practice partnership. She is trained as a sociologist, and her work has focused on education, healthcare delivery, diversity/inequality, and innovation/pilot programming. This has included partnerships with entities based at Duke University, Duke Health, as well as community and non-profit organizations.

In addition to serving as a practitioner of applied research and evaluation, she is active in teaching and capacity-building in these areas. She has taught research and evaluation methods courses at the undergraduate and graduate level and has developed and led numerous trainings serving non-profit, education, and healthcare sectors.

Wylin Wilson, PhD

Wylin Wilson is an Associate Professor of Theological Ethics. Professor Wilson’s work lies at the intersection of theology, gender, and bioethics. Her academic interests also include rural bioethics and Black church studies.

Prior to joining Duke Divinity School in 2020, she served as a teaching faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and as a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. She has also served as visiting lecturer and research associate at the Harvard Divinity School Women’s Studies in Religion Program.

Professor Wilson is the former associate director of Education at the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, and former faculty member in the College of Agriculture, Environment, and Nutrition Sciences at Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama. Professor Wilson served as Theologian in Residence at the Children’s Defense Fund 31st Annual Hall-Proctor Institute for Child Advocacy, the advisory board for the Rural Child Hunger Summit, and as volunteer spiritual care giver for Somerville- Cambridge Elder Services in Somerville, Mass. Among her publications is her latest book, Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality and Black Women’s Health and Economic Ethics and the Black Church.

Jessilyn Dunn, PhD

Jessilyn Dunn is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke University. She directs the BIG IDEAs Lab, which is focused on digital health innovation, wearable sensors, and the development and validation of AI-driven digital biomarkers.

Dr. Dunn is the Principal Investigator of research initiatives funded by the NIH, NSF, and FDA which are developing digital biomarkers of conditions ranging from pre- and type 2 diabetes to influenza-like illness to Opioid Use Disorder. She sits on the Google Consumer Health Advisory Panel and is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the IEEE EMBS Early Career Achievement Award for her leadership and innovation across engineering and medicine.