Berkley Center

Elizabeth K. Cassidy is the director of international law and policy at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), where she has worked since 2007. Before USCIRF, Cassidy was assistant executive director of UN Watch, a non-governmental organization in Geneva, Switzerland. She also worked as a legal consultant to several human rights NGOs in Windhoek, Namibia.

Peter S. Henne is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on religion and security and Middle East politics. He is the author of Islamic Politics, Muslim States and Counterterrorism Tensions (2017). He received a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University in 2013 and worked as a research associate with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project.

Katrina Lantos Swett is president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. She is a former commissioner and chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Lantos Swett also teaches human rights and American foreign policy at Tufts University.

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.