Board of Directors
Aaron S. Allen, PhD
Director of the Environmental & Sustainability Program, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Aaron S. Allen, PhD
Director of the Environmental & Sustainability Program, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Aaron S. Allen, Ph.D., F.A.A.R., is director of the Environment & Sustainability Program and associate professor of musicology. A native of rural Appalachia, he earned his B.S. (environmental studies) and B.A. (music) at Tulane University. Dr. Allen then earned a Ph.D. in music at Harvard University. He received the Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize for 2011-12 and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (see this interview about his time at the AAR). Dr. Allen published Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge 2016), which won the 2018 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology; UNCG Now provides a short article about the book, and here and here are interviews about the Prize.
Before being appointed Program director in 2015, Dr. Allen served as UNCG’s first Academic Sustainability Coordinator. He worked with faculty to increase and improve sustainability throughout UNCG, especially through workshops on how to incorporate sustainability into the curriculum. Dr. Allen worked with the Office of Sustainability to bridge academic and operations efforts, created the “Introduction to Sustainability Studies” (then ENV 110, now GES 162) and “Sustainable Campus Operations” (ENV 350, GES 360) courses, established the Sustainability Faculty Fellows Program, and helped to institutionalize the UNCG Green Fund. Dr. Allen also co-lead the effort to create the new Department of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability. His environmental leadership began with three years as president of the student environmental organization at Tulane, where he led efforts to institutionalize sustainability. As an undergraduate, he was twice selected as a Udall Scholar in part for his work to green Tulane via his undergraduate honors thesis, “Greening the Campus: Institutional Environmental Change at Tulane University.” Dr. Allen continues to serve on the executive committee of the UNCG Sustainability Council. He is also a member of the board of directors of Population Connection.
Dr. Allen co-founded and for five years chaired the Ecocriticism Study Group (ESG) of the American Musicological Society, and he co-founded and chaired the Ecomusicology Special Interest Group (ESIG) of the Society for Ethnomusicology. These two organizations co-host and co-established the “Ecomusicologies” conferences and the Ecomusicology Review. Dr. Allen’s conference presentations on ecomusicology include venues in music scholarship (e.g., the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology), interdisciplinary studies (e.g., 19th-Century Studies Association), and environmental studies (e.g., American Society for Environmental History, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences). He has given invited lectures at institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia.
A number of Dr. Allen’s publications are publicly available here.
After completing a dissertation on Beethoven reception in nineteenth-century Italy, Dr. Allen has continued to develop this unusual field of reception studies. He has delivered conference presentations and invited talks and has published papers on the topic. He is slowly working on a book tentatively entitled Fidelio in Italy: Beethoven Reception, Historiography, and the Crisis of 19th-Century Opera. Dr. Allen travels to Italy frequently and offers a unique travel class that combines music and sustainability studies.
Aaron is originally from rural West Virginia, and his interests as an outdoorsman, environmentalist, and woodworker result from his time on the family farm, where he recently hand built a solar-powered log cabin with and for his parents.
Alexandra Behette, MA
Vice President of Institutional Development at Girl Scouts of the USA
Alexandra Behette, MA
Vice President of Institutional Development at Girl Scouts of the USA
Donna Crane
Lecturer, Department of Political Science, San José State University
Donna Crane
Lecturer, Department of Political Science, San José State University
Donna joined the Population Connection Action Fund Board of Directors in October 2023, bringing with her 26+ years of experience as a political strategist and lobbyist. With expertise in women in politics, political campaigns, and laws pertaining to reproductive rights, Donna is often consulted by the press, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.
Donna has worked at NARAL Pro-Choice America and the American Public Health Association, among other organizations. She currently lectures on politics and government at San José State University and at Menlo College in California.
Donna has a BA in Political Science from San José State University and an MA in Legislative Affairs from the George Washington University. She speaks Spanish, has lived abroad, and is an avid traveler.
Kerry Haynie, MPIA, PhD, Treasurer
Dean of the Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science and African & African American Studies, Duke University
Kerry Haynie, MPIA, PhD, Treasurer
Dean of the Social Sciences, Professor of Political Science and African & African American Studies, Duke University
Kerry L. Haynie earned B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Master’s degree from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Before joining the faculty at Duke in 2003, he was a member of the faculty at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Haynie’s research examines how the underlying theory, structures, and practices of American political institutions affect African Americans’ and women’s efforts to organize and exert influence on the political system. In addition to articles in various academic journals, his publications include, New Race Politics in America: Understanding Minority and Immigrant Voting (co-edited with Jane Junn, Cambridge University Press), African American Legislators in the American States (Columbia University Press), The Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics, Volume I: African Americans and Asian Americans(Oryx Press); The Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics, Volume II: Hispanic Americans and Native Americans (Oryx Press), and Race, Gender, and Legislative Representation: Toward a More Intersectional Approach (with Beth Reingold and Kirsten Widner, Oxford University Press), winner of the 2021 Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize from the American Political Science Association for the best book in legislative studies. Haynie and Beth Reingold previously won the American Political Science Association’s Women and Politics Research Section’s Best Paper Award (2012). Professor Haynie is the founder and director of the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement (SITPA), a national junior faculty mentoring initiative supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Dara Purvis
Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law
Dara Purvis
Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law
Professor Dara E. Purvis is a scholar of family law, sexual orientation and gender identity, feminist legal theory, and masculinities. She’s taught at Temple University Beasley School of Law since the fall of 2024; her classes have included Family Law; Contracts; Sexuality and the Law; and Children and the Law.
Professor Purvis’s recent work focuses on the constitutional rights of transgender children, and she’s written extensively on gender, masculinities, same sex marriages, and other issues. Her scholarship has featured in the California Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, and Cambridge University Press. She’s also written for The New York Times.
Before she came to Temple, Professor Purvis was a professor at Penn State Law, where she also served as Associate Dean for Research. Previous to Penn, she was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. A former editor-in-chief of Yale Law Journal, she clerked for The Hon. Gerard E. Lynch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and The Hon. Raymond C. Fisher, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Professor Purvis earned her law degree from Yale Law School, where she served as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She has an M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University, where she did a dissertation on “The American Same-Sex Marriage Debate: Perspectives from the Marital Legal History of Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.” She earned her BA summa cum laude, from the University of Southern California, where she served as Salutatorian. She’s received many honors and awards throughout her educational and professional career.
Duff Gillespie, PhD
Professor Emeritus, John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dept. of Population, Family and Reproductive Health
Duff Gillespie, PhD
Professor Emeritus, John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dept. of Population, Family and Reproductive Health
Duff Gillespie is a Senior Scholar at The Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health; Professor Emeritus, Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Project Director for AFP, the organization of Advance Family Planning. Duff also worked in USAID’s Global Health Bureau and its Office of Population. He most recently taught a spring term graduate level course, “Understanding and Changing International Reproductive Health Policy.”
Duff earned his PhD at the University of Washington and has worked in the population and health field for 30+ years. His research interests are wide-ranging and varied, but always center equity, inclusion, and access to all reproductive health care. He describes his research as, “I am interested in transforming knowledge into action and especially the diffusion of innovations. While I hope to make some contribution to knowledge creation, I have more experience and skills in advancing knowledge utilization by policy makers and program administrators.
“Concerning knowledge creation, I am currently analyzing family planning through an equity lens using DHS data from the 44 country surveys that include asset index information. I will also explore the inequality of abortion use in those DHS-countries with good abortion statistics. Lastly, I will examine the “inverse equity hypothesis” using DHS data from surveys in countries that have had more than one DHS.
“Much of my energy, however, will be devoted to promoting interventions with strong evidence of effectiveness, but which have not been adopted and/or funded by policy makers, e.g., family planning as a core component of post-abortion care programs. I also plan to work on identifying and filling evidence gaps.
“While some interventions with strong evidence bases are not adopted, other promising interventions have inadequate or the wrong type of evidence, e.g., the epidemiological based relationship between under 5 mortality and birth spacing. I will be less engaged in conducting research than in identifying gaps and obtaining support for others to fill these gaps, utilizing my relationship with funding organizations.”
Duff has received numerous awards and recognition for his work, including (but not limited to) Administrator’s Distinguished Career Service Award, USAID, 2003 Lifetime Recognition Award, Global Health Council, 2003 Presidential Rank Award, Meritorious Executive, 2001 USAID Group Award, Global and Legislative and Public Affairs Bureaus, 1997 USAID Superior Honor Award, 1995 Presidential Rank Award, Meritorious Executive.
He’s published 40+ articles on subjects as diverse as “HIV status and educational attainment in Ethiopia;” ”Population statistics: Does child survival limit family size?” and “International family-planning budgets in the ‘new US’ era,” and in journals ranging from Nature; Studies in Family Planning; and The Lancet.