Team: Co-Directors Elaine Howard Ecklund and John H. Evans
Elaine Howard Ecklund
Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and a professor of sociology at Rice University, as well as director of Rice University’s Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance. Theoretically, her sociological work explores how individuals and small groups bring changes to larger institutions that constrain them. Substantively, her work explores this topic in relationship to religion and science, gender, race, and immigration in different national contexts.
Ecklund is the author of seven books, over 100 peer-reviewed research articles, and numerous op-eds. She has received over 10 million dollars in grants and awards, including those from the Templeton Religion Trust, Lilly Endowment, Inc., Templeton World Charity Foundation, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Her research has been covered over 5,000 times in national and international news media, including USA Today, Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.
She received a Ph.D. in 2004 from Cornell University, where she was the recipient of the Class of 2004 Graduate Student Baccalaureate Award for Academic Excellence and Community Service. In 2013, Ecklund was winner of the Charles O. Duncan Award for outstanding research and teaching achievement at Rice University. In 2018, she gave the Gifford Lecture at the University of Edinburgh. Ecklund has previously served as chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Religion and as president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Over the past several years, Ecklund’s research has explored how scientists in different nations understand religion, ethics, and gender. Ecklund teaches classes at the graduate and undergraduate level on immigration, sociology of science, classical sociological theory, research methods, and religion in public life.
John H. Evans
John H. Evans is a professor of sociology, Tata Chancellor’s Chair in Social Sciences, associate dean of Social Sciences, and co-director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his B.A. from Macalester College and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He has been a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, and has held visiting professorial fellowships or honorary professorships at the universities of Edinburgh, Muenster, Ben Gurion, and Queensland.
He specializes in examining debates that involve religion and science in the public sphere, trying to use social science to contribute to humanistic and ethical debates, and is particularly focused on ethical debates about human genetics. He is the author of two books that concern the history and nature of the field now called bioethics, two books about societal views of biotechnology, and a book on the micro-structure of the human gene editing debate. He is also the author of Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict Between Religion and Science (University of California Press, 2018) which argues that the religion and science debate should increasingly focus on moral conflict between religion and science.