Cullen Buie is an Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Laboratory for Energy and Microsystems Innovation. His laboratory explores flow physics at the microscale for applications in materials science and applied biosciences. He is also an entrepreneur and in 2017 co-founded Kytopen, a start-up that has raised over $40M to revolutionize the manufacturing of engineered cellular therapies. He earned his PhD from Stanford University. Buie has been honored with the NSF Career Award (2012), the DuPont Young Professor Award (2013), the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2013), and the NSF Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (2016). Cullen is a member of The Veritas Forum board.

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Pianist Mia Chung was the first-prize winner of the 1993 Concert Artists Guild Competition and a recipient of the 1997 Avery Fisher Career Grant. She has appeared with the Alabama, Baltimore, Harrisburg, National, and New Haven symphonies; the Boston Pops; and the Seoul Philharmonic, among others. An active recitalist, she has performed in major concert halls including the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall, Seoul’s Sejong Art Center, and Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. A 1993 Artistic Ambassador for the United States Information Agency, she toured Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. She was also a member of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society II. Her CD and DVD recordings of works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Lee Hyla have earned high praise and awards. Dr. Chung graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. She received a master's degree from Yale University and a doctorate from the Juilliard School. Her teachers have included Peter Serkin, Boris Berman, Raymond and Anne Hanson, and George Manos. She joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in 2012. With Arnold Steinhardt she teaches the Curtis-Coursera course The World of the String Quartet.

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.

Andra Gillespie is Associate Professor of Political Science & Director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Her research focuses on the political leadership of the post-civil rights generation. In particular, she studies African American politicians who attempt to transcend race and how Black voters respond to them. She earned her PhD in Political Science from Yale University. She is the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America (2012) and Race and the Obama Administration: Symbols, Substance, and Hope (2019) and the editor of Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post- Racial Black Leadership (2010).

Nancy Hill is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on parenting and adolescent development. She, along with Alexis Redding, have recently published a book focused on the developmental benefits of delaying adulthood, The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood, (Harvard University Press, 2021). This book provides evidence for the historical precedence and rationale for extending the time to adulthood.  

In addition, Hill’s research focuses in on two broader areas. First, she studies the ways race, socioeconomic status, and community context interact and impact youths’ opportunities for upward mobility, especially through secondary school and postsecondary transitions. Second, her research focuses on the relational supports and mechanisms associated with adolescents’ emerging sense of purpose and views of the economy as they influence post-secondary transitions to college and career. These include familial and school-based supportive relationships and how they support youth as they engage in school, succeed academically and hone their goals, aspirations, and sense of purpose. Hill is known for her work identifying developmentally sensitive strategies to maintain parental involvement in education during adolescence.

Hill’s current research projects include two research-practice partnerships. One is a longitudinal study following adolescents across high school, focusing on economically and ethnically diverse youth and their emerging sense of purpose and views of the economy as they influence post-secondary transitions to college and career. The second is focused on academic engagement and postsecondary planning among immigrant youth. In addition, she and her colleagues are collaborating with a large urban school district on how families experience school choice and the impact on equitable access to high quality educational opportunities.

Hill’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals in the fields of developmental psychology and education, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Journal of Educational Psychology. She has edited five books in the areas of parenting and academic achievement during adolescence and among ethnic minority populations.

Hill was a recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship to support her engagement with the Massachusetts’ Executive Office on Education, under Governor Deval Patrick. She was awarded the Ernest Hilgard Award for Lifetime contributions to psychology from Division 1 of the American Psychological Association. Hill was named to the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine’s (NASEM) Board on Children Youth and Families. She is president-elect of the Society for Research in Child Development.

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).

John Owen is Amb. Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. A former Chair of the Politics Department, he is a Senior Fellow at University if Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and the Miller Center of Public Affairs. His latest book is The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order (2023). He is author of Confronting Political Islam (2015), The Clash of Ideas in World Politics (2010), and Liberal Peace,  Liberal War (1997). He has published in a number of academic journals and media outlets, including Foreign Affairs and the New  York Times. A former Editor-in-Chief of Security Studies, he has held fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, the Free University of Berlin, the WZB Berlin Social Science Research Center, and the University of British Columbia. In 2015, he received a Humboldt Research Prize (Germany). He holds an AB from Duke University, an MPA from Princeton University, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Praveen Sethupathy is Chair of Biomedical Sciences, Professor of Physiological Genomics, and Director of the Center for Vertebrate Genomics at Cornell University, where he leads a research lab focused on genomic approaches to understand physiology and human disease.  He received his BA degree from Cornell University and his PhD in Genomics from the University of Pennsylvania.  After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Human Genome Research Institute under the mentorship of NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, he moved in 2011 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics.  The same year he was selected by Genome Technology as one of the nation’s top 25 rising young investigators in genomics.  In 2017, he returned to Cornell University as an Associate Professor.

Praveen has authored over 130 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals such as PNAS, Cell and Science and has served as a reviewer for over 50 different journals.  Honors include a faculty merit award for outstanding teaching and mentoring, the prestigious American Diabetes Association Pathway To Stop Diabetes Research Accelerator (which is awarded to only three people per year), and the inaugural Boehringer Ingelheim Award for Excellence in Summer Research Mentorship.  

Praveen is also dedicated to improving science communication and has served on the advisory board for the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. Praveen has been an invited speaker for The Veritas Forum and serves on the Board of Directors for the BioLogos Foundation, which seeks to convey harmony between science and faith. Praveen’s laboratory is located on the 7th floor of the Research Tower on Tower Road. He lives in Brooktondale, NY with his wife and three children.

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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Tyler VanderWeele is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Director of the Human Flourishing Program, and Co-Director of the Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality at Harvard University. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance, and biostatistics. His methodological research is focused on theory and methods for distinguishing between association and causation in the biomedical and social sciences and, more recently, on psychosocial measurement theory. His empirical research spans psychiatric and social epidemiology, the science of happiness and flourishing, and the study of religion and health. He is the recipient of the 2017 Presidents’ Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS). He has published over four hundred papers in peer-reviewed journals, is the author of the books Explanation in Causal Inference (2015), Modern Epidemiology (2021), and Measuring Well-Being (2021), and writes a monthly blog on topics related to human flourishing for Psychology Today.

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.

Troy Van Voorhis is the Robert T. Haslam and Bradley Dewey Professor  and Department Head of Chemistry at MIT. Troy earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics from Rice University and his PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he joined the faculty of MIT. His research focuses on the intersection of quantum mechanics and chemistry.