Berkley Center

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.

Brian Grim is president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation and a leading expert on the socioeconomic impact of restrictions on religious freedom and international religious demography. Grim served as 2015-2016 chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Role of Faith and works closely with the Business for Peace platform of the United Nations Global Compact. From 2006 to 2014 Grim directed the largest social science effort to collect and analyze global data on religion at the Pew Research Center. He also worked for two decades as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. He is author of numerous articles and books, including The Price of Freedom Denied (2010), and writes the Weekly Number blog. He was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project from 2014 to 2016. Grim holds a doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University.

Mohammed Hafez is Associate Professor and Chair of the Doctoral Committee at the naval Postgraduate School. His research interests include the politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Islamic social movements, Jihadism, terrorism and suicide bombings, and radicalization. Professor Hafez has written numerous books about Islamic movements including Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers and Suicide Bombers in Iraq: The strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom. Professor Hafez has also written numerous book chapters and journal articles on Islamic movements and has made several appearances on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NPR, C-Span and other national and international media outlets.

William Inboden is executive director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for National Security, associate professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin. Inboden is a non-resident fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and senior advisor with Avascent International. Previously he served as the Legatum Institute's senior vice president and senior director for the White House’s Strategic Planning on the National Security Council. Inboden also worked at the Department of State as a member of the Policy Planning Staff and special advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom. He is the author of Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (2008) and Foreign Policy magazine contributing editor. From 2014 to 2016, he was an associate scholar with the Berkley Center's Religious Freedom Project. Inboden received his Ph.D., M.Phil., and M.A. degrees from Yale University and A.B. from Stanford University.

Samer Shehata is the Colin Mackey and Patricia Molina de Mackey Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Shehata’s research interests include Middle East politics, Islamist politics and movements, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, the political economy of the Middle East, social class and labor, development, elections, Egyptian politics, ethnography, and the hajj. He previously taught at Georgetown University, New York University, Columbia University, the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, and the American University in Cairo. He received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from the Politics Department at Princeton University in 2000.

Monica Duffy Toft is a professor of government and public policy at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government. She previously was an associate professor of public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government from 2004 to 2012 and director of the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs from 2007 to 2012. She was the assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies from 1999 to 2006. Her research interests include international relations, religion, nationalism and ethnic conflict, civil and interstate wars, the relationship between demography and national security, and military and strategic planning. Duffy Toft was an associate scholar with the Religious Freedom Project from 2011 through 2013. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science and Slavic languages and literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara, summa cum laude.