Berkley Center

Sheik N. Hassan is senior associate dean, academic affairs, and associate professor at the Howard University College of Medicine, where he has worked since since 1974. Hassan is a specialist in pulmonary/critical care and internal medicine and a member of the American College of Chest Physicians. 

John P. Langan, S.J. was the Cardinal Bernardin Chair in Catholic Social Thought in the Department of Philosophy, Rose Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and a faculty fellow at the Berkley Center at Georgetown University until his death in March 2020. He also taught at Yale Divinity School, Drew University, and Loyola University Chicago. Langan's research interests included ethics and international affairs, especially applications of just war theory; human rights in theory and practice; capital punishment; Catholic social teaching; the place of religion in liberal political thought; and the ethical theories of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. He edited Catholic Universities in Church and Society (1993) and A Moral Vision for America (1998). Langan held an A.B., M.A., and Ph.L. from Loyola University, as well as a B.D. from Woodstock College and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D., was emeritus professor of medicine and medical ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and founding director of the Center for Clinical Bioethics, renamed in his honor in 2013. Pellegrino passed away in 2013.

David Saperstein was the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom from January 2015 to January 2017. He is currently is an adjunct professor with the Center for Jewish Civilization in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and previously was a senior research fellow of the Religious Freedom Research Project at the Berkley Center. An ordained rabbi, he served for several decades as the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism representing the public policy positions of the Reform Jewish Movement, the largest segment of American Jewry, to the government and leading the movement’s efforts to strengthen social justice programming in synagogues across North America. Over the years, he headed several national religious coalitions, including co-chairing the Coalition to Preserve Religious Liberty, and served on various national boards, among them the NAACP, People for the American Way, and the World Faiths Development Dialogue. In 1999 and 2000, Saperstein served as the first chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. He was a crucial part of the faith-based movement that supported passage of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. A frequent media commentator on religion and public life, Saperstein is also an attorney and taught, for over 30 years, seminars on First Amendment law and Jewish law at Georgetown University Law Center.