Dr. Robert Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His main area of research is political philosophy, with an emphasis on democratic theory and liberalism. More»
Dr. Cristina Moya is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is an evolutionary anthropologist interested in how humans respond adaptively to culturally structured social worlds. Two main foci of her research are: intergroup interactions and social cognition; and cross-cultural variation in social effects on reproduction. More»
Dr. Sarah Mathew is Associate Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She studies the evolution of human ultra-sociality and the role of culture in enabling it. She is especially interested in how humans evolved the capacity to cooperate with millions of genetically unrelated individuals, and how this links to the origins of moral sentiments, prosocial behavior, norms, and large-scale warfare. To address these issues, she directs a theoretically-informed field research program among the Turkana, a subsistence pastoral society in Kenya who cooperate at a large scale, including in lethal interethnic raids, without formal centralized political institutions. More»
Dr. Lucia Melloni is a Research Leader of the Neural Circuits, Consciousness and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Her research areas include domain-general cortical computations, neural mechanisms by which the brain predictively controls sensory processing and perception, brain mechanism subserving language comprehension, and possibilities and limits of brain plasticity to restore cognitive functions. More»
Dr. William Harris is Professor Emeritus of Anatomy at Cambridge University and fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He was head of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience since its formation in 2006 until his retirement in 2018. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2007, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2007, and a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2012. In 2017, he was awarded the Waddington Medal by the British Society for Developmental Biology for his work on the development of the visual system. He is the author of Zero to Birth: How the Human Brain Is Built. More»
Dr. Martin Lang is an Assistant Professor at Masaryk University investigating the evolution of ritual behavior and the relationship between anxiety and rituals. More»
Dr. Bart Streumer is Professor and Vice-Dean at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. His expertise is in metaethics and ethics. He is the author of Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory About All Normative Judgements. More»
Dr. Patrick McNamara is an Associate Professor of Neurology in the Department of Neurology at the BU School of Medicine and Professor of Psychology at National University, and Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religion Project, along with Dr. Jordan Grafman. Upon graduating from the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at Boston University in 1991, he trained at the Aphasia Research Center at the Boston VA Medical Center in neurolinguistics and brain-cognitive correlation techniques. He then began developing an evolutionary approach to problems of brain and behavior and currently is studying the evolution of the frontal lobes, the evolution of the two mammalian sleep states (REM and NREM) and the evolution of religion in human cultures. He is the author of The Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Experience: Decentering and the Self. More»
Dr. Dimitris Xygalatas is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Psychological Sciences and head of the Experimental Anthropology Lab at the University of Connecticut. He has also served as President of the International Association for the Cognitive and Evolutionary Sciences of Religion. His interests include ritual, sports, cooperation, the interaction between cognition and culture, and the impact of cultural practices on psychophysiological wellbeing. He is the author of The Burning Saints: Cognition and Culture in the Fire-walking Rituals of the Anastenaria, and, more recently, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living. More»
Dr. Moshe Hoffman is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and Lecturer at Harvard's Department of Economics. He applies game theory, models of learning and evolution, and experimental methods, to try to decipher the (often subconscious and subtle) incentives that shape our social behavior, preferences, and ideologies. More»
