Distinguished Alumni Awards

Deborah Liu BSE’98 is the co-founder of Ember AI and the former president and CEO of Ancestry. She previously spent more than a decade as a senior executive at Meta, where she created Facebook Marketplace, now used by more than a billion people each month. During her time there, she also helped develop Facebook’s first direct response advertising product and its mobile ad network, helped build the company’s games business, and led its payments platform, including Facebook Pay. Earlier in her career, Deb led the eBay Buyer Experience product and the eBay product at PayPal, helping connect the two platforms, and began her career as an associate at the Boston Consulting Group. Deb serves on the board of directors of Intuit and Poshmark and advises and invests in early-stage technology companies. She holds several patents in payments and commerce technologies and has spent more than two decades building global consumer products. She has been recognized as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Women of Influence, one of Business Insider’s Most Powerful Female Engineers, and one of PaymentsSource’s Most Influential Women in Payments. Deb is the founder of Women In Product, a nonprofit organization with more than 30,000 members dedicated to connecting and supporting women in product management and leadership. She also serves on the board of the Committee of 100 and on the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering Board of Visitors. Deb graduated summa cum laude with a BSE in civil engineering from Duke University and earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in California with her husband and three children. Her older daughter, Bethany, will join the Duke Class of 2030.

Erika Moore, PhD’18 is an assistant professor in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she leads the Moore Lab. She earned her bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Duke University. Dr. Moore’s research focuses on engineering biomaterial platforms to study how macrophage immune cells drive tissue repair, inflammation, and disease. She specifically focuses on the gap between what is known in the clinic and what is studied on the bench, focusing on conditions such as systemic lupus erythematosus and uterine fibroids. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the NIH R35 Maximizing Investigators Research Award, the NSF CAREER Award, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare, and selection as a TED Fellow. In addition to her research, she is the founder of Moore Wealth Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to advancing financial literacy and workforce readiness for students in STEM.

Jeffrey T. Glass, MBA, PhD is the Hogg Family Director of Engineering Management and Entrepreneurship and a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Since joining the Duke faculty in 2003, Jeff has served in several pivotal leadership roles, including interim dean of the Pratt School of Engineering and twice as senior associate dean. As an architect of Pratt’s professional education ecosystem, he led a nearly ten-fold increase in enrollment for the Master of Engineering Management (MEM) program, authored the proposal to create the Master of Engineering (MEng) degree, and served as the founding director of the Institute for Enterprise Engineering. His commitment to the student experience is further reflected in his role in creating the 360 Fellows undergraduate advising program and as co-director of the university-wide Duke Computing Initiative. Jeff is an internationally recognized scholar in materials science and co-creator of Duke’s Center for WaSH-AID as well as a standing council member of the NSF Engineering Research Visioning Alliance. Jeff holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Virginia, as well as a Global Executive MBA from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.