Berkley Center

John Gallagher is a senior vice president at a New York capital management firm. Previously, he served in the Trump Transition Team on presidential appointments for national security and intelligence. Following 25 years in the U.S. Army, he worked in the non-profit sector on political reform, religious freedom, and extremism in the Middle East and Asia. Prior, he was a special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, the commander of U.S. Central Command, and the commander of all Coalition forces in Afghanistan. From 2007 to 2009, Gallagher was a White House Fellow and director for Iraq and Afghanistan at the National Security Council. A former airborne infantry officer, Gallagher is a graduate of West Point and the University of Chicago. At West Point, he taught American politics and counterterrorism and was the director of the academy’s Rhodes Scholarship program. A co-editor of Debating the War of Ideas (with Eric Patterson, Palgrave 2009), Gallagher was a 2016 Presidential Leadership Scholar and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Eric Patterson serves as president of the Religious Freedom Institute and is a research fellow with the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. He previously served as dean of the School of Government at Regent University, and before that, as associate director at the Berkley Center. He is an expert in two overlapping areas: the ethics of war and peace, and global religious trends and religious freedom policy. These two areas routinely intersect, such as in building post-conflict systems that represent diverse ethnoreligious factions, understanding the religious factors in conflict, and measuring U.S. democracy promotion efforts. His government experience includes time at the U.S. State Department, service as a White House Fellow, and over 20 years as an Air National Guard commander. He is the author or editor of 20 books, including Politics in a Religious World: Toward a Religious Informed U.S. Foreign Policy (2011).

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.