Berkley Center

Patrick Fagan is Senior Fellow and Director of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) at the Family Research Council. His research examines the relationships between family, marriage, religion, community, and social problems. He has also studied and published various articles on the impact of family life and religion on key social policy areas such as education, crime, health, and income. Before joining the Family Research Council, Fagan was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Family and Community Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by President George H.W. Bush and was a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation for thirteen years. A native of Ireland, Dr. Fagan received his Bachelor of Social Science in sociology and social administration and a professional graduate degree in psychology as well as a Ph.D. from University College Dublin.

Thomas F. Farr is president emeritus of the Religious Freedom Institute, an NGO committed to achieving worldwide acceptance of religious liberty. Farr is also a senior fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. From 2006 to 2018 he was an associate professor of the practice of religion and world affairs at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow at the Berkley Center; during 2017 and 2018 he was director of the Religious Freedom Research Project and from 2011 to 2016 director of the Religious Freedom Project, both at the Berkley Center. After a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Foreign Service—which included teaching at West Point and the Air Force Academy, serving as an advisor during U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva, and leading an interagency task force on verification provisions for the START II Treaty—Farr served as the first director of the U.S. State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom from 1999 to 2003.

Scott Kim is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at University of Michigan – Ann Arbor and a co-director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine (CBSSM). His work focuses on research ethics policy, with special emphasis regarding the involvement of decisionally-impaired individuals in research, ethics of high-risk research, and the ethical issues that arise between academics and industry. In addition to being a psychiatrist, he is also a philosopher and applies his training in that field to consider how the relationship and tensions between normative theories and empirical realities in research do and should affect public policy. Kim holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School.

Crystal Park is Professor of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, where she is also the Director of the Graduate Certificate Program on Health Psychology. Her research interests include stress, coping, and adaptation; the ways in which beliefs and spirituality affect how people deal with stressful events; stress-related growth; and health psychology. Currently she is the principal investigator for projects on the quality of life of cancer survivors, yoga research, and the effects of spirituality on health and mortality. Dr. Park has published her research in several journals in the areas of social and clinical psychology, behavioral medicine, and general internal medicine, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Christina Puchalski is the founder and Executive Director of the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health and Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences at The George Washington University School of Medicine. Through her work she has pioneered novel clinical and educational techniques for integrating spirituality into numerous disciplines in healthcare. She is the author of numerous publications, including A Time for Listening and Caring: Spirituality and the Care of the Chronically Ill and Dying (Oxford, 2006), and has been principal or co-principal investigator in several research projects dealing with spirituality and healthcare. Her work has appeared on numerous print and television media including Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Washington Times.

Timothy Samuel Shah is a distinguished research scholar in the Politics Department at the University of Dallas, as well as as a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute and the principal investigator for the Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society (FORIS) project at the Religious Freedom Institute. Previously a research professor of government at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, he also served as associate director of the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project, director for international research of the center's Religious Freedom Research Project, and associate professor of the practice of religion and global politics in Georgetown University's Government Department. He is a political scientist specializing in religious freedom as well as in the broad relationship between religious and political dynamics in theory, history, and contemporary practice. He is author of God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (2011, with Monica Duffy Toft and Daniel Philpott) and editor of Under Caesar's Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution (2018, with Daniel Philpott) and Homo Religiosus? Exploring the Roots of Religion and Religious Freedom in Human Experience (2018, with Jack Friedman). Shah received his A.B., magna cum laude, in 1992 and a Ph.D. in 2002, both from Harvard University.