Alumni Profiles Series: Gary Bennett

Dean Gary G. Bennett came to Duke University in 1997 to pursue a Ph.D. in Clinical Health Psychology after graduating from Morehouse College. After Duke, Dr. Bennett joined the Harvard School of Public Health as an Alonzo Smythe Yerby Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Epidemiology and remained at Harvard as an assistant professor of Society, Human Development & Health. Dr. Bennett’s passion for research and mentorship brought him back to Duke in 2009 as an associate professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, where he developed one of the first research programs in digital health and was instrumental in founding Duke’s undergraduate major in Global Health. In 2018, Dr. Bennett became Duke University’s Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and was appointed Dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences in 2023.

Tell me about yourself.

I never imagined I was going to do research; I never imagined that I would study psychology. I certainly never pictured myself going to graduate school in psychology. But I took this course from a really terrific professor—I think it was an abnormal psychology class—who started talking about this construct called “John Henryism” and its impact on the cardiovascular system. [John Henryism is a phenomenon where people facing prolonged adversity, such as racism or economic and social inequality, may suffer increased stress that damages their health due to their attempts to work harder in response to the constraints of societal structures.]

I couldn’t imagine that there was actually any data supporting this. I shared that with her, and she invited me into her lab where she was studying the concept. I went in and was completely bitten by the bug: I loved being in the research lab, I loved the community, I loved the work, and I loved discovery.

I was unsure if I was going to go to graduate school at that point. I took the LSAT because I thought I was going to go to law school. I took the GRE, and I figured I would try to apply for graduate school because that seemed like something I should do. I had interests in behavioral medicine and health psychology—areas where Duke is a leading institution—and I thought I should study clinical psychology because I thought I might wind up being a clinician—I didn’t think that I was going to be a researcher.

I was connected with a professor named Redford Williams who was a luminary in behavioral medicine. He gave me one of the most memorable interviews I’ve ever had in my life, and crazily they let me in. And the rest is sort of history. I worked with Redford and he was very open to my silly ideas and provided terrific advice and terrific mentoring. I got great clinical training here, which really changed my whole perspective on the world and on my career. I met my wife my first year of graduate school here, and my experience here has put me on a path I would never have imagined for myself.

What career plans did you have in mind as you were completing your graduate degree?

I had a line of research that I thought was reasonably promising. I was doing work in the lab on the physiological impacts of exposure to different types of stress. I was really interested in how stress effects on the neuroendocrine system varied in different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. It was going really well. But clinically I was seeing patients on the transplant team in heart, lung, liver, and kidney here at Duke. My job, among other things, was to help patients who were not quite ready to be listed for transplant through a whole series of behavior-change experiences: helping some folks to stop smoking who needed a heart transplant, or to stop drinking if they needed a liver transplant, or helping patients to lose weight.

It was a challenging time for me because I had extraordinary difficulty helping patients lose weight. I was struck by the disconnect between what I imagine is the biggest motivator you could possibly have—impending impending death—and the challenge of losing weight. We were reasonably successful in helping people to stop drinking or smoking or finding ways to increase family support, but we just could not help with weight loss. I thought, there is something really interesting going on here that makes this condition intractable to our treatments, or maybe our treatments simply aren’t very good.

The other thing that was happening was that I kept seeing a lot of patients who were socioeconomically disadvantaged. Patients from rural or urban parts of North Carolina who were far too young with polypharmacy, multiple medical conditions, and obesity, and I was losing them all too frequently. This convergence of poverty and behavioral challenges that were leading people to chronic disease and shortened life expectancy struck me. I needed to spend more time thinking about those questions.

That was around the time I was applying to postdocs, and it pushed me to apply for a postdoc in public health. I got a postdoc at the Harvard School of Public Health, and I went there and changed my research area, which was hard for me, but the right thing to do.  

My path was actually a little circuitous. I started my faculty position at Harvard, and it was going very well. I was doing intervention work on obesity in medically vulnerable communities, but I didn’t feel like I was having the impact that I wanted to have. I wasn’t seeing the changes in people’s lives that I came to really enjoy as a clinician.

I co-founded a startup at the same time where I was designing digital treatments for obesity, physical activity, diet, and stress. This was in the very early days of those kind of digital therapeutics. We then sold it to a much larger company, I took a sabbatical from Harvard, and I spent just under a year working in a large company. It really was a sea change for me: in industry, I did work where I was able to put the interventions we created into practice and to touch many lives. That was something that I had a yearning for as an academic, and it was very confusing in a way. I had been taught that we can have this kind of impact with our research, but actually I experienced it more in industry at that point in my career.

I tried to learn as much as I could about that [industry] world, but I found myself asking research questions all the time, so I decided to leave and come back to academia. But I also decided that as much as I loved public health, I was looking for a different kind of experience as a faculty member. I wanted to spend more time teaching undergraduates, and I wanted to mentor more graduate students. I looked around and happily found a position at my alma mater and came back. I’ve started additional companies since then, but I really found a home both as a researcher and as a teacher and mentor here. It’s been wonderful.

How did you transition from being a faculty member in Psychology & Neuroscience to your position as Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences?

It’s been driven by a search for impact. One of the first experiences I had was leading the development of an undergraduate major in global health. The director of the Global Health Institute asked me to chair the committee to develop the major, and I had never done anything like that before. I had no idea why they asked me, but it was one of the most intellectually exciting times of my career. It also aligned with my interest in engaging students, who really wanted the major. At that time, there wasn’t a major, nationally, in global health at an institution like ours. So, colleagues and I worked together for a long time, and then we dreamed up this idea of a co-major. We marshalled it through faculty governance, and it ultimately became very popular: we had a hundred majors within a couple of years, and I became the director of undergraduate studies.

The day that the major passed faculty governance, I was driving home and I was ecstatic. I was really excited about the impact that the major was going to have for our students. And as arduous as the substance and politics of the work were, it was really invigorating for me as a professional. So, I decided that I might want to spend some more time experiencing leadership of that type, and when a position opened for the position of Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education, I applied for it. And to my shock I got it. I spent the next five years in the Provost’s Office leading undergraduate education strategy. Then the pandemic hit. As a person who is trained in public health, I was able to put some skills into practice in ways that I found very fulfilling and that I hope were helpful. At the end of my term, I decided to apply to be Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences.

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What does your day-to-day look like?

Each day is really different. It’s usually 10-12 meetings a day. Literally no two days are alike. Every day there is a combination of meeting and engaging with my leadership team, our faculty, and students, solving problems and potential problems, and identifying areas where we can be doing more to invest in the future of the College. But truly every day is a profound surprise. Invariably one or two meetings will walk onto the calendar each day that I could never have expected. The reason my days are so compressed is that I’m trying really hard to prioritize the boundary between my professional life and my actual life. The best days are when I can drop off my kids at school, and make dinner and hang out with them in the evening. My most important job is dad, and my most important function is being present to hear what they have going on during the day.

What has been the most surprising part of your job as Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences?

I’ve met with many, many dozens of faculty in the first year in this job, and I asked everybody the same question: “What’s keeping you here?” Our faculty colleagues could be doing a lot of things at a lot of places. Literally everyone has answered by celebrating the people and the community here. And that certainly was and is my experience; ours is a community of wonderful, brilliant, and dedicated people.

What is the best career advice that you’ve ever received?

It’s not enough to have mentors; you also have to have advocates. And they’re different. Advocates are often people who share opportunities, recommend you, and provide specific feedback. They’re often people who see you work, but you don’t often see them working for you.

Do you have any advice for current graduate students?

Oh my gosh, you have so many options! I so love it when our graduate students do not close themselves off to the wide array of possible directions they might follow. I would encourage graduate students to be really open about sharing their interests. You might actually find that not all of us want, or expect, you to pursue an academic career. Many students imagine that after a mentor has invested so much time in working with you that they want somehow to see you go do this thing that feels important to the mentor, but actually after someone spends so much time investing in their relationship with you, they just care about you.

What is one of your favorite memories at Duke?

So many people warned me about returning to your graduate institution as a faculty member. In the sixteen years after coming back to Duke, the faculty in psychology and neuroscience have never treated me like a former graduate student. They welcomed me in as a colleague on day one and they have been just absolutely tremendous. Coming back as a faculty member and living into that experience has been wonderful.

However, my favorite memory is an easy one. It was meeting my wife in my first year of graduate school. She was a work-study student for the chair of psychology at the time, and the departmental administrator set us up. We later married in the Chapel and eventually returned to start our family. We share four Duke degrees, two Duke-fan children, and a deep love for this place.

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AUTHOR

Mercedes Muñoz
Ph.D. candidate, Psychology & Neuroscience

Mercedes Muñoz is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Psychology & Neuroscience specializing in developmental and social psychology. She works in the Duke Identity and Diversity Lab and the Duke Culture Lab where her research broadly examines how a person’s race and culture influence their social cognition. Mercedes is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and her primary line of research investigates Latino racial and ethnic identity in children and adults. She received her bachelor’s degree with honors from Boston University and is originally from El Paso, Texas.