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.

Jonathan Brant is Dean for Research and Culture, and the Director of the Renaissance Project, at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. He is also the Founding Director of the Oxford Character Project and has taught and conducted research as a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford since 2014. Jonathan is the author of many popular and academic books and articles and his research and teaching interests lie in the fields of systematic theology; theology of arts and culture; virtue ethics (especially with respect to leadership); and the theory and practice of contemporary mission. After completing his doctorate at Trinity College (Oxford) in 2008, he served as the Oxford Pastorate Chaplain with overall responsibility for leading a team serving the postgraduate and research community. He was ordained in 2011 and served his curacy at St Clement’s, Oxford. Jonathan is married to Tricia and has an adult son, Isaac. When not working, he might be found walking in the Cotswolds or watching films in a local cinema.

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.

Professor Esther Chung-Kim is Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. Professor Chung-Kim specializes in the history of world Christianity, including the European Reformations. She has served as Associate Director of the Gould Center for Humanities and President of the American Society of Church History. Her research examines religious conflict, history of poverty, and religious influence on politics, economics, and society in the early modern era. She has written Inventing Authority: Reformation Debates over the Eucharist (2011)which explores the question of religious authority in the midst of conflict. She has co-edited The Reformation Commentary on Scripture: Acts (2014),an important contribution to the history of biblical interpretation. Her most recent book, Economics of Faith: Reforming Poor Relief in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021, paperback 2023) examines the role of religious reformers in the development of poor relief institutions. Recent journal articles and essays have been published in Women Reformers in Early Modern Europe (2022); Archive for Reformation History 113:1 (2022); Lutheranism and Social Responsibility (2022), Awakening to Justice: Voices from the Abolitionist Past (2024), and On Earth as in Heaven? Liturgy, Materiality, and Economics (2025). 

Dr. Gehrman is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and a clinical psychologist at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.  He directs the Sleep, Neurobiology and Psychopathology lab at Penn.  He has an active research program exploring the mechanisms and treatment of sleep and circadian dysregulation in the context of mental health disorders.  Dr. Gehrman’s clinical specialization is on the delivery of cognitive behavioral and chronotherapeutic interventions for insomnia, circadian rhythm disorders, and other sleep disorders.  The overarching goal of his work is to advance the understanding of the links between sleep and mental illness through translational research that spans biology to therapeutics.

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 Engineering and Computer Science 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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Tracy McKenzie (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is a professor of history at Wheaton College, where he holds the Arthur Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning and is a recipient of the college’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Prior to coming to Wheaton, he taught for twenty-two years at the University of Washington, where he held the Donald Logan Chair in American History, served on the university’s Teaching Academy, and was a recipient of the institution’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

At the University of Washington, McKenzie’s research focused on the South during the American Civil War, and he published award-winning monographs in that field with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Since coming to Wheaton, he has shifted his attention to helping others think “Christianly” about U. S. History. A past president of the Conference on Faith and History, he understands his vocation as that of remembering the past and reminding the church. Toward that end, he has authored The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us about Loving God and Learning from History, A Little Book for New Historians, and We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Almighty Has His Own Purposes: Abraham Lincoln and American Civil Religion.

McKenzie lives in Wheaton with his wife of thirty-nine years, Robyn. Two of their grown children are Wheaton alumni: Callie (’14) and Margaret (’18).

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.

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.

Dr. Sarah Schnitker is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University as well as the Associate Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Research Initiatives and Director of the BRIGHTS (Baylor Research in Growth and Human Thriving Science) Center. Schnitker studies virtue development in adolescents and emerging adults, focusing on the role of spirituality/religion in virtue formation. Schnitker has published more than 120 peer-reviewed articles and has procured more than $16 million in funding as a principal investigator on multiple research grants. Schnitker has served as an Associate Editor or Editorial Board member for Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Journal of Research in Personality, and Journal of Positive Psychology. She is a co-editor of the Handbook of Positive Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. She is an American Psychological Association (APA) Fellow, winner of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) Spirituality and Meaning Division Researcher Award, and recipient of mentoring awards from the APA and IPPA. 

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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.

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.