Academic Partners

DGEP's academic partners from the intellectual power behind the vision, just as the community partners from the heart.

DGEP is where the hearts and minds of the world meet!  As the leader in the intellectually anchoring of the world’s first equity education research and development park, North Carolina Central University brings an array of resources to the effort.  NCCU, a leading HBCU:, is joined by its partner institutions – all world renown and research 1 institutions – who have co-anchored the world’s largest research park (RTP) for more than 70 years.

Duke University, NCCU’s neighbor in Durham located 5 minutes away, is represented by Duke’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center for Social Equity, a center of the Terry Sanford School of Public Policy.  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is represented by the Urban Investment Strategies Group, a center of the Kenan-Flagler Business School’s Kenan Institute of Free Enterprise.  North Carolina State University is represented by the Business Sustainability Collaborative and B Corp Clinic of the NCSU Poole College of Management.  Scholarship disciplines represented among these Co-PIs include economics, demography, environmental sustainability, complexity science, public policy, engineering, business, city and regional planning, and entrepreneurship – all through a racial equity lens.  This creates a unique intellectual collective to challenge racial equity.

The faculty leads from these DGEP partner universities have collaborated across different projects and efforts for over 20 years.  They have been considered by many to be the best in the world at what they do and in their fields.  This partnership includes the leading scholar and institute in the world, Dr. William Darity and Cook Center, focused on federal US government Reparations for black Americans.  It also includes Dr. Jim Johnson, the leading demographer scholar focused on the impact of racial change in America and its impact on equitable entrepreneurship.  It includes the former Deputy Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Dr. Faye Calhoun, now the Director of NCCU Partnerships and Cooperative Agreements – including serving as Director of the NCCU-Duke Partnership Agreement.  The partnership includes Dr. Henry McKoy, a former banker, entrepreneur, developer, former Assistant Secretary of North Carolina Department of Commerce, and considered the leading thinker in equitable community and entrepreneurial ecosystems development in the United States.