Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His research examines how culture shapes human flourishing in diverse institutional contexts (i.e., business, science, and religion), as well as how beauty shapes our lives and work.
Ginamarie Lynch is the Project Manager for the Work and Well-being in Science study. Ginamarie holds degrees in sociology (B.A., The Catholic University of America) and theology (M.T.S., Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family.) Her research interests include areas of gender, family, sexuality, and theological anthropology.
Bridget Ritz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where she is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Religion and Society and the Center for Ethics and Culture. Bridget’s empirical research examines work and well-being in science; abortion attitudes among non-activists; and parenting for religious transmission. Bridget received her M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago (2015) and her B.A. in Politics from Ave Maria University.
Dr. Di Di is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Santa Clara University. Her work explores how social institutions and individual identities are conditioned by national context, gender, ethnicity, religion, and profession.
Christopher Jacobi is a doctoral student in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is a quantitative sociologist with research interests that often stretch into related disciplines like demography, epidemiology, health economics, and psychology. His main research fields are medical sociology, happiness/flourishing/well-being/quality-of-life studies, and the sociology of religion.
David Johnson is an associate professor of higher education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. His research agenda examines how universities are shaped by changes in their institutional environments, especially as it relates to capitalism, religion and politics.
Dr. Kelly is a social psychologist and mathematical theorist of culture whose research focuses on emotion, identity, and communication. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Catholic University.
Venkat Nadella is a Policy Research Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. His research and professional interests are in the design, implementation, and evaluation of public policies in India. His research is published in the Journal of Technology Transfer, National Tax Journal, Public Budgeting and Finance, Public Finance Review, and Transport Policy.
Sarah Neitz is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She researches aesthetic experience and social action.
Bendetta Nicoli is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Sociology at the Catholic University of Milan. Her research interests lie primarily in secularization and religious change and science, spirituality, and ultimate questions. Since 2014 she has been working at the Centre for the Anthropology of Religion and Cultural Change (ARC), Catholic University of Milan.
Poonam Pandey is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at FLAME University, India. She is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the interface of STS, development studies and innovation studies. Her recent work engages with the debates on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) from a global south perspective. Broadly, her work focuses on understanding knowledge politics, inclusion and justice in socio-technical systems. In particular, she is interested in understanding the processes through which values are attributed to different knowledge claims/ systems during science-society interaction.
Micah Roos is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His research interests include knowledge, science, religion, culture, stratification, measurement, racial attitudes, and quantitative methods. He ties these interests together through a quantitative, measurement approach to the sociology of knowledge and culture, with a focus on stratification along the early life course. Another strand of his work involves applying techniques in confirmatory factor analysis to the problem of differential item functioning or item-level bias. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stefano Sbalchiero is Researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padova, where he teaches “Social Research Methods” and holds data analysis laboratories. His research interests are mainly focused on intercultural and communicative processes, religion and spirituality, methodology and epistemology of social research, qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
Cesare Silla is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Urbino and he also teaches at Catholic University of Milan. He researches in areas of historical sociology, sociological theory and urban media studies. He spent research periods in different universities in Europe and North America (Columbia University in New York, University College Cork in Ireland, Humboldt University in Germany, Notre Dame in Indiana US, The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.). Among his publications, see “Modernity as a Classical Problem in Sociological Theory” (with B. Vaidyanathan), in Abrutyn, S. and Lizardo, O. (eds.), Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory, pp. 37-64. Switzerland: Springer, 2021 and The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America, 1880-1930, Routledge, London-New York 2018.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at the think tank Theos and is writing a history of science and religion, The Natures of the Beast, which will be published in 2023.
Amy Unsworth is based in London, UK. With an academic background in the Biological Sciences and in Science Communication, she has spent the past decade studying perceptions of science among various publics using both qualitative and quantitative research methods.
Peter Varga is reading for the DPhil in Experimental Psychology at Christ Church, Oxford where his research examines the transfer of emotion between composers and listeners through music. He joined the Work & Wellbeing Study team as part of the Global Research on the Aesthetic Dimensions of Science project whilst an undergraduate at The Catholic University of America, where he earned his BA in Psychology with minors in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theology & Religious Studies.
Milena Ivanova is a Bye-Fellow at Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge, UK. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Bristol. She has held positions at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Sydney. Her work investigates how aesthetic values shape scientific practice, with her current focus being on the aesthetic dimensions of scientific experimentation. She is the author of Duhem and Holism (Cambridge University Press 2021) and co-editor of The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding (Routledge, 2020). Currently, she is co-editing a book on The Aesthetic Nature of Scientific Experiments and working on a monograph titled Beautiful Science.
Gabe received his PhD in Sociology from Yale GSAS in 2005. From 2005 to 2018, he held a research/teaching position in the Department of Sociology and Public Health at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). In January 2000, he shifted to higher education administration/strategic planning and is currently a Research Analyst & Statistician in Yale’s Office of Institutional Research & Strategic Analysis. In his current position, he regularly conducts statistical research, leads several of Yale’s major university survey projects and provides strategic analysis to support decision making that is relevant to the Universities policies and operations.
At UTSA he received tenure to Associate Professor and also held two key administrative positions as Director of the Sociology Graduate Program and Director of the Multidisciplinary Studies Degree Program. At UTSA Gabe primarily conducted research exploring linkages between religion and health, mental health disparities, and the social context of mental and physical health outcomes. His research appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Social Forces, Sociological Theory, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of Religion and Health, Review of Religious Research among others.
Gabe has three adult daughters, enjoys music, travel, books and films. He resides with his 25 year old daughter in Cheshire, CT.
Stephen Cranney is a freelance data scientist in the Washington, DC area and a Non-Resident Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for the Studies of Religion. He is married with six sons and has published over 20 peer-reviewed studies.
