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.

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 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.

Professor F. LeRon Shults, Professor of Systematic Theology, Agder University, Norway.       

F. LeRon Shults is professor of theology and philosophy at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. He is the author of eight books including "The Evolution of Rationality" (Eerdmans, 2006) and "Christology and Science" (Ashgate, 2008). Shults has published over forty scientific articles, and is chief editor of a new book series by Brill Academic publishers: "Philosophical Studies in Science and Religion." His book on "The Faces of Forgiveness" (with psychologist Steve Sandage) won the Narramore Award for Excellence in the Integration of Theology and Psychology. His current research interests include desire, compassion and philosophies of difference.

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.