Eric A. Appel is an Associate Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He received his BS in Chemistry and MS in Polymer Science from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA. Eric performed his MS thesis research with Dr. Jim Hedrick and Dr. Robert Miller on the synthesis of polymers for drug delivery applications at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. He then obtained his PhD in Chemistry with Prof. Oren A. Scherman at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research focused on the preparation of dynamic and stimuli-responsive supramolecular polymeric materials. For his PhD work, Eric was the recipient of the Jon Weaver PhD prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Graduate Student Award from the Materials Research Society. Upon graduating from Cambridge, he was awarded a National Research Service Award from the NIBIB and a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Prof. Robert Langer at MIT on the development of supramolecular biomaterials for applications in tissue engineering and drug delivery. Eric’s research at Stanford focuses on the development of biomimetic polymeric materials that can be used as tools to better understand fundamental biological processes and to engineer advanced healthcare solutions. His research has led to more than one hundred publications and 40 patents. He has been awarded young faculty awards from the Hellman Foundation, American Diabetes Association, American Cancer Society, and PhRMA Foundation. Eric received the 2022 IUPAC Hanwha-TotalEnergies Young Polymer Scientist Award, the 2023 Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award, and the 2023 Biomaterials Science Lectureship Award. In 2024, Eric was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering.

Emily Austin is an Associate Professor of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago. She writes on Homer, especially emotions, as well as literary depictions of solitude in ancient Greece. Her first book, Grief and the Hero: the Futility of Longing in the Iliad, explores the nexus of grief, longing and anger in the Iliad. She is currently working on a second book, Solitude and its Powers in Ancient Greece, which identifies surprising moments when ancient Greek poetry conceives of solitude as a good thing. She is committed to mentoring students from all walks of life, helping them to navigate the personal and professional challenges of academia.

Prior to the Crown Family School, Carolyn Barnes was an assistant professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Barnes’s research has been supported by the William T. Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Blue Cross Foundation of North Carolina, The Wallace Foundation, and several family foundations. She completed a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy from the University of Michigan, where she worked as an affiliate of the National Poverty Center conducting research on the effects of nonprofit community-based service provision on parenting practices and the psycho-social well-being of families and children.

Chris Barrett is an agricultural and development economist at Cornell University. He is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and an International Professor of Agriculture at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, as well as a Professor in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Faculty Director of the Cornell Collaboration on International Development Economics Research, a Senior Faculty Fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Institute for Food Systems. He is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Food Policy, edits the Palgrave Macmillan book series Agricultural Economics and Food Policy, and is an Editorial Board member for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is an elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and the African Association of Agricultural Economists, and an Honorary Life Member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He has won numerous university, national and international awards for teaching, research and policy outreach and public service. His more than 375 publications have been cited more than 63,000 times, placing him among the top five scholars globally in the agricultural economics, development economics, food security, poverty, and resource economics fields, according to Google Scholar, well within the top 1 percent of all economists worldwide according to RePEc/IDEAS, and in the top 50 economics and finance scholars globally per research.com. He has served as a principal investigator on roughly $60 million in extramural research grants from various corporate, foundation, government agency and nongovernmental organization sponsors. He has supervised more than 100 graduate students and post-docs, many of whom now serve on faculty and staff at leading universities and research institutes worldwide. He has held senior leadership roles at Cornell, including as the Deputy Dean and Dean of Academic Affairs of the SC Johnson College of Business, and as the David J. Nolan Director of the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, as well as externally as President of the Association of Christian Economists, and on a variety of boards and panels. He was previously on faculty at Utah State University and has been a visiting faculty member at Harvard, Melbourne, Monash, Notre Dame, Stanford, and UC-San Diego. 

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Lori Peterson Branch is an associate professor of Restoration and 18th-Century British Literature at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include religion, secularism, and the novel; postsecular studies; literary theory and theology; and the Bible and literature. She graduated from Indiana University with a PhD in 2000.Lori’s scholarship focuses on the British long 18th century but has ranged from the 4th-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers to the Twilight saga. Across her work, she is interested in thinking critically about secularism as an ideology and in finding fresh language to speak about religion in all its breadth and complexity as one encounters it in literature, the world today, and personal experience. Lori’s contention is that a thorough-going critique of the secular/religious binary produced in the Enlightenment upends conventional understandings of both religion and secularity, enabling people to grapple with uncertainty, interpretation, and faith in new ways that are distinctively literary and postsecular.

Read Peterson Branch's recent publication "How To Talk About Religion and Literature: A Modest Proposal," in Modern Language Quarterly.

Ang Chen is an associate professor in the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University of Michigan. He is interested in building secure, efficient, and reliable computer systems, drawing from diverse techniques as needed. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and in his free time, he enjoys reading books with his four-year old, Priscilla.

Catherine Crouch is Professor of Physics and Department Chair at Swarthmore College. She is an expert in pedagogical best practices for undergraduate physics education as well as an experimental condensed matter physicist; her work on physics for life science and pre-medical students is currently supported by the National Science Foundation. She co-founded the STEM Inclusive Excellence initiatives at Swarthmore to expand support and resources for underrepresented and first-generation students in the sciences. She earned her PhD in physics at Harvard University and also worked as a postdoc at Harvard with Eric Mazur from 1996 to 2003 before beginning her faculty position at Swarthmore.

Sarah Hamersma is Associate Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University.  Her career as an economist has been focused on evaluating the effects of anti-poverty programs, and much of her research examines the implications of public health insurance and nutrition programs for health outcomes of children and labor market outcomes of parents.  Her ongoing research agenda is focused on maternal and infant well-being, with a particular interest in policies that can alleviate threats to fetal health and support people with disabilities.  Prof. Hamersma recently served as the director for Syracuse University’s PhD in Public Administration.  She is passionate about training public servants and is an award-winning teacher of quantitative methods for policy research, including PhD applied econometrics.  She helps lead the Association of Christian Economists and currently serves on the board of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers.  In addition, Sarah participates in the Cardus Fellows Program and Newbigin Fellows Program and is a founding member of Syracuse University’s newly formed Christian Staff and Faculty Association.  

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Dr. Nathan Hatch is an American academic administrator, active leader in higher education, and historian. He most recently served as President of Wake Forest University for 16 years, retiring in 2021. A graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois, he received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities. He joined the faculty at Notre Dame in 1975 and in 1996 he was named provost, the university’s second highest-ranking position. He is regularly cited as one of the most influential scholars in the study of the history of religion in America. He received national acclaim for his 1989 book, The Democratization of American Christianity, in which he examines how the rise of religious groups in the early 19th century helped shape American culture and foster democracy. In 2014, Hatch was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina with his wife, Julie.

Elizabeth Jackson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. Her research is in epistemology and philosophy of religion. In epistemology, she is interested in the belief-credence connection, epistemic permissivism, and pragmatic and moral encroachment. In philosophy of religion, she’s interested in the rationality of religious commitment, and specifically Pascal’s wager and the nature of faith. She completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and had previous appointments at Australian National University and Toronto Metropolitan University.

Jonathan Kao is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCLA, where he directs the Neural Engineering and Computation Lab. He received his BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. His research is at the intersection of AI, neuroscience, and engineering. Jonathan's lab uses AI to understand how populations of neurons in the brain work as a circuit to produce behaviors including motor control, decision-making, and social interaction. His lab also builds brain-machine interfaces to help people with paralysis move and communicate with the world. He is the recipient of the NIH Director's New Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Grant, and Hellman Fellowship. Jonathan teaches courses in AI, deep learning, computational neuroscience, and brain-machine interfaces, and is the recipient of the Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award.

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Jonathan Koch is assistant professor of English at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA. A native of Baltimore, Professor Koch received his BA from Davidson College and his MA and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on early modern British literature, history, and religion, with a particular focus on the experiences and expressions of religious toleration in seventeenth-century England. Professor Koch has published articles on toleration and on book history and has held fellowships at the California Institute of Technology and the Henry E. Huntington Library. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “With a Forbearing Spirit: The Poetics of Religious Toleration in Revolutionary England,” which asks how early modern women and men imagined the experience of tolerating—of ‘bearing with’ one another—in plays, verse, satire, and polemic.

David E. Lewis is the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include the presidency, executive branch politics and public administration. He is the author of two books, Presidents and the Politics of Agency Design (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance (Princeton University Press, 2008). He has also published numerous articles on American politics, public administration, and management in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Public Administration Review, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. His work has been featured in outlets such as the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, and Washington Post. He is a member of the National Academy of Public Administration and has earned numerous research and teaching awards, including the Herbert Simon Award for contributions to the scientific study of the bureaucracy and the Madison Sarratt, Jeffrey Nordhaus, and Robert Birkby awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

Before joining Vanderbilt’s Department of Political Science, he was an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, where he was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. He began his academic career at the College of William and Mary, where he was an assistant professor in the Department of Government. He currently serves as the president of the Southern Political Science Association. He serves on the editorial boards of Presidential Studies Quarterly and Public Administration. PhD. Stanford University.

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David M. Lodge is the Francis J. DiSalvo director of Cornell University’s Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.  He is an internationally recognized environmental scientist, with expertise in environmental risk assessment, freshwater and marine coastal ecology, ecosystem services, bioeconomics, and invasive species (including from ships’ ballast and biofouling). His research has improved ecological forecasting to better inform environmental risk assessment, natural resource management, and policy development.

Lodge is a leader in the development and application of environmental DNA (eDNA), a transformative technological tool for discovering unrecognized biodiversity, censusing aquatic biodiversity, and improving the management of imperiled and invasive species. Lodge has a long history of collaborating with engineers, economists, historians, theologians, and philosophers and has partnered with non-profit organizations and corporations to bring his scientific work to the public policy arena.

He is past president of the Ecological Society of America, and former senior science advisor in the US Department of State’s Office of Polar Affairs. On numerous occasions, he has testified before the U.S. Congress and served as an expert witness in federal court. He served as the first chair of the U.S. government’s national Invasive Species Advisory Committee, led research on freshwater biodiversity as part of the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and served on the scientific advisory boards for NOAA and the International Joint Commission.

He is a faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.

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John T. McGreevy is the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He previously served as the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of Notre Dame's College of Arts and Letters from 2008 to 2018. McGreevy is the author of four books: Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1996), Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (W.W. Norton, 2003), American Jesuits and the World (Princeton University press, 2016), and Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis (W.W. Norton, 2022). His books and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, and Italian. He has received major fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, and the Erasmus Institute, and has published articles and reviews in the Journal of American History, The New York Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, the New Republic, the Chicago Tribune and other venues. He served on the 2010 jury for the Pulitzer Prize for History and was co-chair of the Commonweal Foundation board from 2018–2023. McGreevy earned his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Notre Dame and his master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Stanford University.

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was most recently the Director of the Honesty Project, funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In recent years he was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project, funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and the Director of the Character Project, funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 120 academic papers as well as Moral Psychology with Cambridge University Press (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). He is a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics (Bloomsbury Press).

Sua Myong was born and raised in Korea. She came to the US at 16. She obtained her bachelor's in molecular biology and doctorate in biochemistry/nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley. She moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where her husband started a faculty position in the physics department. After finishing her doctorate, Sua started her exciting research in biophysics, working in her husband's lab as a post-doctorate researcher. She found her passion and calling in science, and despite her insufficiency and shortcomings, God led her to a tenure-track position in Bioengineering at UIUC. After six years, Sua and her husband moved to the biophysics department at Johns Hopkins University, followed by the most recent move to Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2023. Although she was raised in a Christian home, she did not have faith until after she married, when she started asking fundamental questions about life. God led her to His word of truth through the book of John, and she was born again! Full of joy, from the beginning of her Christian life, God called her to preach the good news of the Gospel to the people around her. Through her journey as a mother of three kids, an instructor of Biophysics, director of undergraduate studies, a researcher, and the wife of an unbelieving husband, God has walked with her so intimately and faithfully as a savior, redeemer, shepherd, father, and friend. She is honored to serve as a Mentoring Lead for the 2025 Veritas Graduate Scholars Program.

Dr. Mark Noll is a leading historian of Christianity and Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame, having previously served as Professor of History and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. Noll is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2006 he received the National Endowment for the Humanities medal at a White House ceremony. His teaching has included courses on American religious and intellectual history, the Reformation, and world Christianity. Dr. Noll has written and edited numerous books, including America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911 (2022), In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 (2016), God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (2008), The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006), America's God, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (2011), and The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (2009). Dr. Noll currently lives in Wheaton, Illinois, with his wife, Maggie.

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Angel Adams Parham’s research is in the historical and comparative-historical sociology of race. She is the author of American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017) which examines changes in race and racialization in New Orleans under the French, Spanish and Anglo-American administrations. The book was co-winner of the Social Science History Association’s Allan Sharlin Memorial book award (2018); co-winner of the American Sociological Association’s Barrington Moore book award in comparative-historical sociology (2018); and recipient of an Honorable Mention from the Thomas & Znaniecki Best Book Award, International Migration Section, American Sociological Association (2018). She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively entitled "Reckoning and Reconciliation: On Race and Memory in Civic Life" which compares and contrasts the social histories of three key sites in New Orleans over a three-hundred-year period as a way of examining and publicly discussing transformations in race, gender and power. She completed her B.A. in sociology at Yale University and her M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as the recipient of a Fulbright grant.

Melanie Penn is a Nashville based songwriter at the crossroads of faith and culture. After studying classical voice in college, she moved to New York City and pursued musical theatre where she enjoyed several years as a mainstay in the theatre scene, most notably playing Sandy on the Broadway national tour of Grease! starring Frankie Avalon.

After years in the Broadway scene Melanie transitioned to songwriting and started a collaboration with Nashville producer Ben Shive. Their first album together was called Wake Up Love (2010), and five more albums followed: Hope Tonight (2015); Immanuel (2017); Immanuel: The Folk Sessions (2019) and More Alive Vols. I and Vol. 2 (2020/2022).

The Immanuel project, Melanie’s songwriting journey through the Christmas story, was called a songwriting tour de force by Christian and mainstream press. It reached No. 1 on Amazon’s Christian, Worship and Holiday Download charts. Melanie is also a worship leader and for many years served at Redeemer Presbyterian Church under the leadership of author and theologian Tim Keller. She has been called “a New York songwriter in the age of skepticism.”

She is best known for her original album, IMMANUEL, a retelling of the Christmas story. In Spring 2025 Mel will release an original album that tells the story of the resurrection.

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Charmaine Royal is the Robert O. Keohane Professor of African & African American Studies, Biology, Global Health, and Family Medicine & Community Health at Duke University. She directs the Duke Center on Genomics, Race, Identity, Difference and the Duke Center for Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation.

Dr. Royal’s research, scholarship, and teaching focus on ethical, social, scientific, and clinical implications of human genetics and genomics, with an emphasis on issues at the intersection of genetics and race. Her interests and primary areas of work include genetics and genomics in African and African Diaspora populations; sickle cell disease and trait; public and professional perspectives and practices regarding race, ethnicity, and ancestry; genetic ancestry inference; and genotype-environment interplay. A fundamental aim of her work is to dismantle ideologies and systems of racial hierarchy in science, healthcare, and society. She serves on numerous national and international advisory boards and committees for government agencies, professional organizations, research initiatives, not-for-profit entities, and corporations.

Dr. Royal obtained a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, master’s degree in genetic counseling, and doctorate in human genetics from Howard University. She completed postgraduate training in ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) research and bioethics at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and in epidemiology and behavioral medicine at Howard University Cancer Center.

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Michael Sloan currently holds the F.M. Kirby Family Faculty Fellowship at Wake Forest University. He graduated from Baylor University with a double major in Classics and Economics.  He then received a Masters in Classical Literature and another Masters in Theology before receiving his PhD in Classics at St Andrews University in Scotland.  He has published widely in his field, including articles on authors such as Aristotle, Augustine, Cicero, Homer, Horace, Erasmus, Euripides, Orosius and others. His first two books were on Sedulius Scottus, a poet and scholar in the age of Charlemagne. He is currently editing a book, which is a survey of Greek and Latin literature, for the ALNTS series.  Wake Forest has awarded Dr. Sloan the Kenyon Family Faculty Fellowship for his excellence in teaching and scholarship, and he has also won the “Reid-Doyle Excellence in Teaching Award”, as well as the Teaching and Learning Collaborative “Innovative Teaching Award”. Dr. Sloan is an active advocate for the Humanities and Liberal Arts, publishing opinion pieces in both local and international news journals.  He has been interviewed and quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other international media outlets for his expertise in classical literature and higher education.

Meghan Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She serves as director of the University-wide Ethics Initiative and is the founding director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. The University’s hub for research and teaching in ethics, the Institute includes the new Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C, Center for Virtue Ethics, the Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab, a major John Templeton Foundation grant to develop the next generation of courses on human flourishing, and highly competitive fellowships and programming.

Sullivan’s books include Time Biases, published in 2018 with Oxford University Press, and The Good Life Method, co-authored with Paul Blaschko and published in 2022 with Penguin. She has received a Joyce Award for Teaching, the Provost’s All-Faculty Team Award, and South Bend’s 40 Under 40 Award. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia, Oxford, and Rutgers, and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

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Professor Ruth López Turley directs the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, which brings together data, research, engagement and action to improve lives. In 2011, she founded the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC), a research-practice partnership between Rice University and 11 Houston area school districts, representing over 700,000 students. A program of the Kinder Institute, HERC works to improve educational equity by connecting research to policy and practice, working directly with district leaders. She directed HERC from 2011 to 2022, during which she raised over $30M so that school districts would not have to pay for research. She also founded the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships, which connects and supports over 60 partnerships between research institutions and education agencies throughout the country. In 2022, President Joe Biden appointed her to the National Board for Education Sciences, which advises and approves priorities for the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. She is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard and is originally from Laredo, Texas.

Abram Van Engen is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Van Engen has published widely on religion and literature, focusing especially on seventeenth-century Puritans and the way they have been remembered and remade in American culture.

Van Engen began his career with a study of sympathy in seventeenth-century Puritanism, drawing together abiding interests in the history of emotions, theology, imagined communities, and literary form. Those interests led to his first book, Sympathetic Puritans, and numerous related articles on early American religion and literature.

Beginning with these concerns, Van Engen has moved from a study of the Puritans in their own place and context to an interest in the way Puritans have been recollected and re-used by later generations. Studying the life of texts and the effects of collective memory, Van Engen has produced a second book, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, along with several other publications that together study the creation and curation of American exceptionalism.

Work on his second project was furthered by participation in the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis, where Van Engen has been leading a team to study the concept and creation of American exceptionalism through a history of the phrase “city on a hill.” That work has led to multiple related digital projects, all in teams with undergraduate and graduate researchers. Collaboration remains essential to his work, with co-edited journal issues, co-written articles, co-taught courses and working groups that bring together literature, history, religion, politics, and psychology.

Van Engen’s undergraduate courses have included Literature, Spirituality, and Religion (a freshman seminar); Early Texts and Contexts; American Literature to 1865; Natives and Newcomers in Early America; City on a Hill (for American Culture Studies); and Morality and Markets (co-taught with the Business School). Graduate seminars have included Puritanism, Literature and Religion, Intro to Graduate Studies, and Marilynne Robinson.