The Undergraduates

Matthew Kirshner 

Matthew Kirshner will enter his sophomore year at Duke University this upcoming fall, studying Economics and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Arabic Track). Through the years, he has maintained a strong interest in his local and global Jewish community, participating in lobbying efforts in D.C. as well as helping to organize events for Beit Harim congregation of the Flathead Valley, Montana. Outside of the classroom, Matthew remains involved with the wider Duke community through participation in Duke Club Lacrosse, the Duke Consulting Club, and Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. In the wider Durham community, he has volunteered for the YMCA youth basketball program. During his free time, Matthew enjoys anything in the outdoors from mountain biking and boating to simply napping.

Scott Powell

Scott Powell is currently a sophomore at Duke University. He studies Computer Science and Statistics with the hopes of one day working as a data scientist. Scott went to high school in Palo Alto, California where he started programming as a hobby. During his free time, Scott enjoys snowboarding and playing tennis.

Faculty Mentors

Laura Lieber

Laura Lieber is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University and director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.  She received her BA in English from the University of Arkansas, her rabbinical ordination from HUC-JIR in Cincinnati, and her PhD from the University of Chicago.  Her most recent book, A Vocabulary of Desire:  The Song of Songs in the Ancient Synagogue, was published in 2014.  She has received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and she will be in residence as a fellow at the National Humanities Center for the academic year 2015-16, where she is writing a monograph on theater and religious ritual in Late Antiquity. 

Richard Lucic

As Associate Chair, I am responsible for the Departments External Relations, Publications & Website, and Outreach efforts.  These activities provide a framework to insure the relevance and quality of the Department’s research and teaching, and generates the necessary funding for Duke Computer Science to compete effectively with other universities as a national resource for research contributions and the production of the highest quality graduates. In addition, the inDuke Industrial Partners Program (in collaboration with Electrical & Computer Engineering) provides a conduit to the corporate information sciences community to facilitate personal interactions and to provide for technical information exchange.

I also serve as the Faculty Curriculum Director of the Information Science + Information Studies Program (ISIS). The mission of ISIS is to study and create new information technologies and to analyze their impact on art, culture, science, commerce, society, and the environment.

Community Mentors

Sharon Halperin
Sharon Halperin is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors from Poland and Latvia. Her parents met and married during World War II and, at the end of the war, were in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany. In 1946, they immigrated to the United States via the SS Ernie Pyle and settled in New Haven, CT. Sharon has lived in Chapel Hill, NC since 1983 with her husband, Edward Halperin, and three daughters. She has worked on annual Holocaust commemorative services for over 30 years and has taught Holocaust mini-courses that focus on lessons of the Holocaust, the use and abuse of power, resistance and rescue, and the role of personal responsibility. Sharon recently participated in The Belfer Conference, an intensive workshop for middle and high school educators which takes place annually at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Sharon has certificates of teacher training from the USHMM, Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior, The Holocaust Educator’s Network, and Appalachian State University’s Summer Symposium for Teacher Training on the Holocaust. She can be reached at sharonhalperin88@gmail.com.