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Board of Advisors
The Board of Advisors possess expertise in fields covering the full range of the foundation's activities and provide guidance on particular projects and larger strategic initiatives.
Thomas Schmidt Eurasia and Australia
Professor of philosophy of religion on the Roman Catholic theological faculty and a principal investigator of the research cluster “The Formation of Normative Orders” at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and Vice Chairman of the German Society for Philosophy of Religion. Schmidt is also a Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt and was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2009.
Professor of philosophy of religion on the Roman Catholic theological faculty and a principal investigator of the research cluster “The Formation of Normative Orders” at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and Vice Chairman of the German Society for Philosophy of Religion. Schmidt is also a Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt and was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in 2009. He studied philosophy, theology, and sociology at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule St. Georgen and the J.W. Goethe University and received his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt. He is the author of several publications including Scientific Explanation and Religious Beliefs (with Michael Parker) and Religion and the Critique of Culture (with Matthias Lutz-Bachmann). Schmidt served as assistant professor in the department of philosophy at California State University Long Beach and visiting professor at the St. Louis University and the University of Washington in Seattle.
Roger Trigg Eurasia and Australia
Senior Research Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and Academic Director of its Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. From 2007-10, Trigg was the co-principal investigator on an interdisciplinary research program on the cognitive science of religion and its implications, between the University of Oxford’s Ian Ramsey Centre and its Centre for Anthropology and Mind.
Senior Research Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and Academic Director of its Centre for the Study of Religion in Public Life. He is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. From 2007-10, Trigg was the co-principal investigator on an interdisciplinary research program on the cognitive science of religion and its implications, between the University of Oxford’s Ian Ramsey Centre and its Centre for Anthropology and Mind. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books on philosophy, including the intersection of religion, science, and public life. His latest book is Equality, Freedom and Religion, Oxford University Press, 2011. Trigg serves as a member of the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, was the founding president of the British Society for Philosophy of Religion, and is a past president of the Mind Association, Most recently (2008-10), he has been president of the European Society for Philosophy of Religion.
Ian Walmsley Eurasia and Australia
Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Oxford. He read physics at Imperial College before moving to the U.S. to study for a Ph.D. in optical engineering at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, NY. Walmsley was a postdoctoral research fellow in electrical engineering at Cornell University and then joined the faculty at Rochester, eventually becoming director of the Institute of Optics. In 2001, he moved to Oxford as the Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics, and served as head of atomic and laser physics.
Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Oxford. He read physics at Imperial College before moving to the U.S. to study for a Ph.D. in optical engineering at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, NY. Walmsley was a postdoctoral research fellow in electrical engineering at Cornell University and then joined the faculty at Rochester, eventually becoming director of the Institute of Optics. In 2001, he moved to Oxford as the Hooke Professor of Experimental Physics, and served as head of atomic and laser physics. He is currently Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and University Collections at Oxford, with broad responsibilities at the institutional level for research across all academic disciplines, libraries, and museums. Walmsley's own research is in experimental quantum optics. This involves the study of non-classical states of light and matter and their interaction, with some view to applications in which quantum phenomena can provide enhanced capabilities over what is possible using the rules of classical physics. The particular expertise of his group is the application of ultrafast lasers to generate, manipulate, and detect small quantum systems, and currently has activity in the areas of linear optics quantum computing, quantum-enhanced precision measurement, coherent control of ultracold matter, attoscience, and ultrafast optical metrology. He has held visiting positions at universities in both Europe and the U.S.
Harvey Whitehouse Eurasia and Australia
After carrying out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties, Whitehouse developed a theory of the role of ritual in group formation that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists. His most recent major project entitled ‘Explaining Religion,' focused on the psychological causes and consequences of religious thinking and behavior.
After carrying out two years of field research on a ‘cargo cult’ in New Britain, Papua New Guinea in the late eighties, Whitehouse developed a theory of the role of ritual in group formation that has been the subject of extensive critical evaluation and testing by anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and cognitive scientists. His most recent major project entitled ‘Explaining Religion,' focused on the psychological causes and consequences of religious thinking and behavior. Funded by the European Commission and employing seven postdoctoral researchers in Oxford, this project involved collaboration with researchers at 14 universities across Europe and North America. Whitehouse is also studying religion from an evolutionary perspective with co-investigator David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton University), on a project funded by the Templeton Foundation. This research combines approaches from the cognitive sciences with Darwinian perspectives on religious evolution. Although an ethnographer by training and background, Whitehouse has for some years been using psychological experiments, economic games, large-scale surveys, and agent-based models to investigate various aspects of religious thinking. Together with psychologist Cristine Legare (University of Texas) he is currently undertaking experiments, funded by the McDonnell Foundation and the Fell Fund, to explore how children acquire and understand ritualized actions. Whitehouse is also interested in the prehistory of religion and makes annual visits to the Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in Turkey where, in collaboration with archaeologist Ian Hodder (Stanford University) and others, he is seeking to discover how changes in the frequency and emotionality of ritual life relate to the shift from hunting and gathering to farming. From 2011-2016 he will be directing a new project on the causes and consequences of rituals in human societies. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, this project will use qualitative field research and controlled psychological experiments to examine how children learn the rituals of their communities and to explore the effects of ritual participation on ingroup cohesion and outgroup hostility. New databases will be constructed to explore the relationship between ritual, resource extraction patterns, and group structure and scale over the millennia. In recent years, Whitehouse has been heavily involved in the creation of new research clusters. He was founding director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast and of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology of Mind. In 2006, Whitehouse was elected to a newly created Chair in Social Anthropology at Oxford University and to a Professorial Fellowship at Magdalen College. From 2006-2009 he served as Head of the School of Anthropology.