Carolyn leads NCGrowth’s economic development research and client projects across North Carolina. She works with local government and community clients to develop and pursue strategies addressing downtown revitalization, business retention and expansion, and economic development planning. Prior to graduate school Carolyn worked 2.5 years in local government for a small North Carolina town.
Carolyn holds a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from UNC Chapel Hill with a specialization in Economic Development.

Zee is a native of Eastern North Carolina. She is pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice at East Carolina University.  Zee brings with a wealth of administrative experience and a unique creative outlook from working with ECU’s Testing Services and an array of small businesses.

Zee is an avid crafter and loves to travel. Zee is a huge supporter of the ARTS, which means you may find her dancing, enjoying a music concert/comedy show or just strolling through a museum.

Elizabeth Basnight is the Assistant Director of Business Programs at NCGrowth. Since 2013 she has supported hundreds of businesses and communities to build shared prosperity through applied research and business technical assistance. Elizabeth has deep roots in Eastern North Carolina. As a student at UNC-Chapel Hill she was part of the NC Fellows Program and received funding to run a surf camp for girls in Nicaragua. She has worked on a risk-reduction program in Cambodia and for several non-profits in Chapel Hill. Her desire to engage students and her drive to support entrepreneurship education led her back to UNC where she served as internship director for the Minor in Entrepreneurship. She has years of experience with small-scale farming and an agritourism business in Saxapahaw, NC.  In her free time, she goes back to her hometown of Morehead City and travels internationally to remote surfing destinations with her two young sons. 

Before the move to KIPE, Darlene worked with the Carolina Small Business Development Fund, a local community development financial institution to provide technical assistance and access to capital to minority and women-owned businesses across the state.   

Darlene has worked for Self-Help and the NC Rural Economic Development Center and is a former Edible Arrangements franchisee.  She recently completed a Doctor of Business Administration degree from UNC Charlotte’s Belk School of Business where she researched entrepreneurship and digital marketing capabilities in female firms.   

Darlene resides in Durham and is married to Kenan Executive MBA Alumni David Deberry.  They have two adult children and enjoy traveling the world. Darlene is a recreational runner and lover of chocolate ice cream. 

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (Ph.D. University of Texas – Austin) is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Business and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Carey Business School, the School of Medicine (Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine), the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Nursing, and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She is also Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Her research program has been devoted to investigating how organizations and their members cope with uncertainty and how organizations can be designed to be more reliable and resilient. She has investigated organizational safety, high reliability and resilience practices in oil exploration and production, wildland firefighting, and in healthcare. She has been awarded multiple research awards and her research has appeared widely in management and healthcare journals. A recent book co-authored with the late Dr. Robert Wears is titled Still Not Safe: Patient Safety and the Middle Managing of American Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is currently serving as a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Transportation Research Board Committee on Emerging Trends in Aviation Safety.

David Autor is Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes.

Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions in the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship.

In 2017, Autor was recognized by Bloomberg as one of the 50 people who defined global business. In March of 2019, he was christened “Twerpy MIT Economist, David Autor” by John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, during a segment on automation and employment. Autor is currently determining how to merchandise this title.

Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.  Her research examines the nature and effects of learning and knowledge utilization about marketing by consumers, managers, organizations, and financial markets. Professor Moorman’s research has been published in a range of top journals, including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, and Administrative Science Quarterly and has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Marketing Science Institute.

Professor Moorman served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Marketing from 2018-2022. She was named the 2018 AMA-Irwin-McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator, the 2022 AMA Foundation William L. Wilkie “Marketing for a Better World” Award, the 2022 Gil Churchill Award for Lifetime Contributions to Marketing Research, an AMA Fellow in 2017, the 2012 Paul D. Converse award for significant contributions to marketing, and the 2008 Mahajan Award for career contributions to the field of marketing strategy. At Duke, Professor Moorman was awarded the 2006 Bank of America award, the highest honor a Fuqua faculty can receive from professor peers.

Professor Moorman is the founder and managing director of The CMO Survey where she collects and disseminates the opinions of marketing leaders in order to predict the future of markets, track marketing excellence, and improve the value of marketing in organizations and in society. She blogs about survey findings at Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Marketing News, and The CMO Survey. Professor Moorman is author of the book, Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value with George S. Day (which was awarded the 2011 Berry Book prize for the best book in the field of marketing) and Strategic Market Management with David A. Aaker.

Professor Moorman has served as an Academic Trustee for the Marketing Science Institute, as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Marketing Association, Chair of the Marketing Strategy Special Interest Group for the AMA, and as Director of Public Policy for the Association for Consumer Research. She has served as area chair, Chair of Dean’s Search Committee, and on the University’s Academic Priorities Committee at Duke.

Professor Moorman’s teaching focuses on marketing strategy with an emphasis on building the organization and capabilities for customer focus. She has taught this class to undergraduate, MBA, and Executive MBA classes and has received numerous teaching awards, including the 2016 Best Elective Teaching Award from the Fuqua School of Business. In 2020, she co-developed a new core class for Fuqua focused on the “Entrepreneurial Mindset” with Manuel Adelino. In all her teaching, she is passionate about helping companies more effectively form strong relationships with customers and views this connection as the key to both firm profitability and the free market system. A former Junior Achiever, Professor Moorman strives to inspire managers to innovate and manage their companies with the passion of entrepreneurs.

Josh Lerner graduated from Yale College with a special divisional major. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Economics Department.

Much of his research focuses on venture capital and private equity organizations. (This research is summarized in Boulevard of Broken Dreams, The Money of Invention, Patent Capital, and The Venture Capital Cycle.) He also examines policies on innovation and how they impact firm strategies. (That research is discussed in the books The Architecture of Innovation, The Comingled Code, and Innovation and Its Discontents.) He co-directs the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program and serves as co-editor of their publication, Innovation Policy and the Economy. He founded and runs the Private Capital Research Institute, a nonprofit devoted to encouraging access to data and research, and has been a frequent leader of and participant in the World Economic Forum projects and events.

In the 1993-1994 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs. Over the past two decades, “Venture Capital and Private Equity” has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School. (The course materials are collected in Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook, now in its fifth edition, and the textbook Venture Capital, Private Equity, and the Financing of Entrepreneurship.) He also established and teaches doctoral courses on entrepreneurship, teaches in the Owners-Presidents-Managers Program, and leads executive courses on private equity. He is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor.

Among other recognitions, he is the winner of the Swedish government’s Global Entrepreneurship Research Award and Cheng Siwei Award for Venture Capital Research. For information on Josh’s compensated outside activities, please see www.bella-pm.com.

Angie Fairchild is a Ph.D. student studying strategy and entrepreneurship at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. Her research interests include environmental sustainability, stakeholder value and corporate social responsibility. She is passionate about empowering businesses to make decisions that foster long-term environmental stewardship and provide value for all stakeholders, including local communities, employees and shareholders.

She previously worked as a health economics research consultant. Her research centered on patients’ willingness to accept therapeutic risks in exchange for treatment benefits and provided rigorous, quantitative evidence of risk acceptability to support regulatory decision makers and pharmaceutical industry clients and collaborators.

Aly is responsible for planning, producing, and editing custom written and visual content for social and other online media channels. Providing website support, she plays an important role in our SEO and analytics efforts. Aly has a deep understanding of business trends, creating impactful content and social media web strategy.

Aly has recently relocated to Durham after being born and raised in Denver. She holds a B.A. in Communication with a minor in Marketing from the University of Wyoming.