Dewi Fortuna Anwar, Ph.D.
is Director for Program and Research of The Habibie Center and Deputy Chairman for Social Science and Humanities at The Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of CIDES (Center for Information and Development Studies). In 1998 and 1999, Dr. Anwar held the position of Assistant to the Vice President for Global Affairs and then Assistant Minister/State Secretary for Foreign Affairs during the Habibie administration. She was also a Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and a Congressional Fellow in Washington. D.C. Dr. Anwar obtained her Ph.D. from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 1990 with a thesis entitled “ASEAN as an Aspect of Indonesian Foreign Policy.”

His Eminence Daniel Ciobotea, Ph.D.
is Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church. He received his doctorate from the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Humanistic Sciences in Strasbourg, France in 1979, and has been Professor of Theology in the Faculty of Orthodox Theology at the University of Iasi since 1992. Prior to 1992, he served as Lecturer at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, Geneva, and Associate Professor at the Department of Christian Mission of the Universitary Theological Institute in Bucharest. Over the past twenty years, Metropolitan Daniel has undertaken numerous initiatives and leadership roles in the ecumenical movement, and is currently a member of the Presidium of the Conference of European Churches. In 1998, he was presented with the Emmanuel Heufelder Award granted by the Niederaltaich Abbey for ecumenical work.

Prof. Sarah Coakley
is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. She was educated at Cambridge (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) and Harvard (Th.M.) universities, and is a systematic theologian and philosopher of religion with wide interdisciplinary interests. She taught at Lancaster and Oxford universities before coming to Harvard in 1993, and will return to England as Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, Cambridge University, in 2008. While at Harvard she has been involved in the interdisciplinary “Mind, Brain, Behavior” initiative from its inception, and has taught courses at Harvard Medical School (with Prof. Arthur Kleinman) and at Harvard Law School (with Prof. Carol Steiker), as well as at Harvard Divinity School. More recently she has been co-leading, with Prof. Martin A. Nowak, the research project on "Evolution and the Theology of Cooperation." Coakley's published works include Powers and Submissions:  Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (2002) and Pain and Its Transformations:  The Interface of Biology and Culture (2007). She is at work on a four-volume systematic theology, the first volume of which will appear as God, Sexuality and the Self:  An Essay 'On the Trinity' in 2008.  Her joint work with Martin A. Nowak will be published by Harvard University Press in 2009 as God, Games and Evolution:  The Principle of Cooperation.

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.
led the Human Genome Project, the international effort to map and sequence all of the human DNA. From the outset, the project ran ahead of schedule and under budget, and all data are now freely available to scientists worldwide. He is currently director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, which is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. In addition to his pivotal role in the sequencing of the human genome and efforts to use that information to improve human health, he is noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes, including those for cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and, most recently, Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. He also has devoted much attention to ethical, legal, and social issues related to genetics. He earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University in 1974 and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1977. His accomplishments have been recognized by election to the Institute of Medicine and U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Prof. Kaikhosrov D. Irani
is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, where he taught for 41 years. He was department chairman for nine years, Director of the Academy of Humanities and Sciences for 12 years, and Executive Director of the Program for the History and Philosophy of Science. His field of teaching and research is philosophy of science, specializing in the conditions of acceptance in scientific theories, and the reality problem in quantum mechanics. In the last 25 years he has worked in the area of history and philosophy of ancient thought — religious, moral, mythic, and technological. He was born in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, and moved to the United States in 1947 to study at Princeton University. He has long been involved in the life of the Zoroastrian community, having served as president and on numerous boards of the Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York. Prof. Irani was honored by the establishment of the K. D. Irani Chair of Philosophy at the City College of New York in 1999, through an anonymous contribution of $2 million by one of his students.

Prof. Kenneth S. Kendler
is the Banks Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Human Genetics at the Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Kendler received his medical and psychiatric training at Stanford University and Yale University, respectively. Since 1983, he has been engaged in studies of the genetics of psychiatric and substance use disorders, including schizophrenia, major depression, alcoholism, and nicotine dependence. He has utilized methods ranging from family studies, to large-sample population-based twin studies to molecular genetic studies aimed at identifying the genomic location of specific genes that influence the vulnerability to schizophrenia, alcoholism and nicotine dependence. He has also examined the relationship between various dimensions of religiosity and risk for psychiatric and substance use disorders. Data collection for these studies has been completed in Virginia, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Norway and Sweden. He has published in more than 490 reviewed journals, has received a number of national and international awards for his work, serves on several editorial boards, and is editor of Psychological Medicine. Since 1996, he has served as Director of the Virginia Institute of Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics.

Michael Novak
is a theologian, author, former U.S. ambassador, and currently holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He was the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Novak graduated from Stonehill College (B.A., Philosophy and English) and the Gregorian University (B.A. Theology). He continued theological studies at Catholic University and then at Harvard, where he received an M.A. in 1966 in History and the Philosophy of Religion. Mr. Novak has written 26 influential books on the philosophy and theology of culture, especially the essential elements of a free society. His writings have appeared in every major Western language, and in Bengali, Korean and Japanese. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, was published underground in Poland in 1984, and after 1989 in Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Hungary, Bangladesh, Korea, and many times in Latin America. His latest book is Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of our Country. For his work and influence, he has received many international awards.

Prof. M. S. Swaminathan
is Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, Government of India, Chairman of the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai (Madras), India, UNESCO Chair in Ecotechnology, and President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. He has served as President of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and Independent Chairman of the FAO Council. He is the recipient of numerous awards, notably, the Bhatnagar Award (1961), Mendel Memorial Medal (1965), Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (1971), Borlaug Award (1979), Einstein World Science Award (1986), First World Food Prize (1987), Padma Vibhusan Award by President of India (1989), UNESCO Gandhi Gold Medal (1999), Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award (2000), Toda Award for Peace Achievement (2002), and Hiroshima Peace Prize (2005). He is the author of more than three hundred research papers and several books. Time magazine ranked him among the twenty most influential Asians of the 20th century, alongside Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

Walter E. Thirring, Ph.D.
is Professor Emeritus in the Department for Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna, where he received his Ph.D. in 1949. He was awarded fellowships to institutions where leading physicists worked, including Schrödinger at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, Heisenberg at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Pauli at the Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich, and to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where he met with Einstein. He served as a professor at MIT, the University of Washington and the University of Bern before being nominated director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Vienna in 1959. He founded an institution of experimental particle physics, later known as the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Science, which participated in experiments leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles. From 1968 to 1971 he was a director in the department for theoretical physics at CERN. When the iron curtain fell in 1989, Dr. Thirring helped to convince the Austrian government to again make Vienna the intellectual center of that part of Europe, and founded the Ervin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics.

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