ISSR Executive Committee

Dr. Munawar Anees, President, KnowSys, USA.
Dr. Munawar Anees is President of Knowledge Management Systems (KnowSys), based in Arizona. A biologist by training, he is widely known as a writer and a cultural critic. He is the author of several books and over 300 articles on religion and science, bioethics, and Islamic studies. One of his works, Islam and Biological Futures: Ethics, Gender and Technology, is considered a classic on Islamic bioethics. Founding and Advisory Editor of many scholarly journals, including Journal of Islamic Science, his Periodica Islamica was hailed as a pioneering initiative on current awareness. Advisor to the former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, he is an elected member of the Royal Academy of Jordan. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in February 2002.

Professor John Hedley Brooke, Andreas Idreos Professor Emeritus of Science & Religion, and Emeritus Fellow Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. Also Honorary Professor of the History of Science, Lancaster University, UK.
Dr. John Hedley Brooke held the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science & Religion and Directorship of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2006. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford and Honorary Professor of the History of Science at Lancaster University. A former Editor of the British Journal for the History of Science, he has been President of the British Society for the History of Science and of the Historical Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1995, jointly with Professor Geoffrey Cantor, he gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. His main books include Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1991), which won the Watson Davis Prize of the History of Science Society; Thinking About Matter: Studies in the History of Chemical Philosophy (Ashgate, 1995); and (with Geoffrey Cantor) Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science & Religion (T & T Clark, 1998; Oxford University Press, 2000). With Margaret Osler and Jitse Van der Meer, he edited Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions (Published as Osiris vol.16 by University of Chicago Press, 2001). He has recently served as Director of the European Science Foundation's Network on 'Science and Human Values' and is a founder member of the Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind (2005-). He is currently President of the UK Forum for Science & Religion and serves on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Science & Religion. In 2007 he became a "Distinguished Fellow" at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Durham. His most recent publications include Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science & Religion, co-edited with Ian Maclean (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Religious Values and the Rise of Science in Europe, co-edited with Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu (IRCICA Istanbul, 2005).

Professor Ronald Cole-Turner, ISSR Vice-President & H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, USA.
Dr Ronald Cole-Turner is the H. Parker Sharp Professor of Theology and Ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, a position that relates theology and ethics to developments in science and technology. He is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. His research focuses on emerging technologies and their potential significance for human life. He is the author of The New Genesis: Theology and the Genetic Revolution (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993) and coauthor (with Brent Waters) of Pastoral Genetics: Theology and Care at the Beginning of Life (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1996). He is the editor of Human Cloning: Religious Responses (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997); Beyond Cloning: Religion and the Remaking of Humanity (1999); and co-editor of God and the Embryo (Georgetown, 2001); and editor of Design and Destiny: Jewish and Christian Perspectives on Human Germline Modification (MIT Press, 2008); he is also the author of numerous articles. In 1998, he won one of 12 international awards for "Quality and Excellence in Teaching" from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences.

Dr. Noah Efron, Chair, Graduate Program in Science, Technology & Society (also, President, Israeli Society for History & Philosophy of Science), Bar Ilan University, Israel.
Noah Efron chairs the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar Ilan University, in Israel. He is also President of the Israeli Society for the History and Philosophy of Science, and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Society for Science and Religion. He has been appointed to serve on the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture's committee to evaluate and regulate genetically modified agriculture and invited to participate in Knesset deliberations on human cloning. Efron has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a fellow of the Dibner Institute for History of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and a fellow at Harvard University. He was recently selected to receive a Greenwall Ruebhausen Fellowship, which will support a brief tenure as a visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon, Rothschild, Posen, John Templeton and Thomas J. Watson Foundations, as well as the Israeli Academy for Higher Education. As a Watson Fellow, he spent a year traveling and researching the dwindling Jewish communities of North Africa. His Real Jews was published in by Basic Books in 2004 and his Judaism & Science: An Historical Introduction was published at the start of 2007. Efron was awarded a Philadelphia Center for Science and Religion Book Grant, with the support of which he is presently writing Playing God: Human and Divine in the Age of Biotechnology. Efron's essays on the politics of religion and the politics of science have appeared in The Jerusalem Report, Midstream, Tikkun, Jewish Action, Hadassah Magazine, World Jewish Digest and the Boston Book Review, for which he was a contributing writer. In 2006, he was awarded the National Jewish Press Association award for best original essay. He has run marathons, slowly, on three continents. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, daughter, son, bunnies and cat.

Professor George Ellis
Professor George F. R. Ellis, FRAS is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town. After completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University with Dennis Sciama as supervisor, he lectured at Cambridge and has been visiting Professor at Texas University, the University of Chicago, Hamburg University, Boston University, the University of Alberta, and Queen Mary College (London University). He has written many papers on relativity theory and cosmology, and inter alia co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space Time with Stephen Hawking, The Density of Matter in the Universe with Peter Coles, and Dynamical Systems in Cosmology with John Wainwright. He has also written on science policy and developmental issues, science education, and science and religion issues, and was co-author with Nancey Murphy of On the Moral Nature of the Universe. He is past president of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation and of the Royal Society of South Africa. He has been awarded various prizes and honorary degrees and was awarded the Star of South Africa Medal by President Nelson Mandela in 1999, and was elected FRS in 2007.

A detailed biography can be found at: www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/index. Among his recent books are Before the Beginning, On The Moral Nature of the universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics and The Far Future Universe.

Professor Nancey Murphy, Professor of Christian Philosophy, Fuller Theological Seminary, USA.
Nancey Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the B.A. from Creighton University (philosophy and psychology) in 1973, the Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley (philosophy of science) in 1980, and the Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union (theology) in 1987.

Her first book, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell, 1990) won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence. She is author of eight other books including On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (Fortress, 1996; co-authored with George Ellis), and Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford University, 2007; co-authored with Warren Brown).

Her research interests focus on the role of modern and postmodern philosophy in shaping Christian theology; on relations between theology and science; and relations between neuroscience and philosophy of mind.

Professor Robert John Russell, Ian G. Barbour Professor in Theology and Science in Residence, The Graduate Theological Union, USA.
Professor Robert J. Russell is the Founder and Director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS), and the Ian G. Barbour Professor of Theology and Science in Residence at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), Berkeley. He is the author of Cosmology from Alpha to Omega: Towards the Mutual Creative Interaction of Theology and Science (Fortress Press, 2008). He has co-edited a multi-volume series of books focused on scientific perspectives on divine action through an international research conference program co-sponsored by CTNS and the Vatican Observatory, including such topics as quantum mechanics, chaos theory, evolutionary and molecular biology, the neurosciences, and quantum cosmology. His current research topics include: resurrection, eschatology and scientific cosmology; quantum mechanics, biological evolution and divine action; evolution, theodicy and christology; philosophical assumptions in contemporary scientific cosmology and their theological roots; time and eternity from a Trinitarian perspective in relation to time in physics. He has been the P.I. of several CTNS international programs, including "Science and the Spiritual Quest" (SSQ) and "Science and Religion Course Program," (SRCP), and he is currently the P. I. of "Science and Transcendence: Advanced Research Series" (STARS). He has served on the JTF Board of Advisors since its inception and has been a judge for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. He holds a Ph.D. in experimental physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.Div. and an M. A. in theology and science from the Pacific School of Religion (one of nine seminaries in the GTU consortium), an M. S. in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and he triple- majored in physics, religion and music at Stanford University. He is ordained in the United Church of Christ. He is a member of the Society of Ordained Scientists.

Revd. Canon. Dr. Fraser Watts, ISSR Vice-President & Reader in Theology and Science, University of Cambridge, UK.
Reverend Dr. Fraser Watts is a clinical and research psychologist by background, and from 1981-93 was a Senior Scientist with the UK Medical Research Council. He is also a Past President of the British Psychological Society. Currently he is Reader in Theology and Natural Science in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Queens' College. His research interests are concerned with the interface between theology and the human and biological sciences, and he directs the Psychology and Religion Research Group in the Centre for Advanced Religious and Theological Studies (CARTS). Current work includes religious cognition, the relationship between theology and psychology, and spiritual healing. He is also ordained in the Church of England and Vicar-Chaplain of St. Edward's Church, Cambridge