Speaker Biographies

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with a special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and coeditor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Mr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as the New York Times, the Guardian, and The Atlantic Monthly. His book How Children Learn the Meanings of Words (MIT Press, 2000) was given the Award for Excellence from the Association of American Publishers and the Eleanor Maccoby Award from the American Psychological Association. His most recent book is Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (Basic Books, 2004).

Arthur C. Brooks is the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and a visiting scholar at AEI, where he researches culture, philanthropy, and social entrepreneurship. He is the author of Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism (Basic Books, 2006), which examines American charitable giving, and he has just finished Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America--and How We Can Get More of It, which will be released in May.

Michael Novak is a theologian, author, and former U.S. ambassador who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the AEI. He is the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Mr. Novak has written twenty-six influential books on the philosophy and theology of culture, especially the essential elements of a free society. His masterpiece, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Madison, 1982), was published underground in Poland in 1984, and after 1989 in Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Hungary, Bangladesh, Korea, and many countries in Latin America.  His latest book is Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Founder of our Country (Basic Books, 2006). For his work and influence, he has received many international awards.

Al Roth is the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University. His research, teaching, and consulting interests are in game theory, experimental economics, and market design. The best known of the markets he has designed or redesigned is the National Resident Matching Program, through which approximately 20,000 doctors per year find their first employment as residents at American hospitals. He has recently been involved in the reorganization of the market for gastroenterology fellows, and he helped design the high school matching system used in New York City to match approximately 90,000 students to high schools beginning in 2004. Mr. Roth is one of the founders and designers of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange for incompatible patient-donor pairs. He is the chair of the American Economic Association’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, which has designed a number of recent changes in the market for newly minted economics PhDs. Mr. Roth is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim and Sloan fellow.

Sally Satel, M.D., is a resident scholar at AEI and the staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She serves on the advisory committee of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Satel was an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University from 1988 to 1993. From 1993 to 1994, she was a policy fellow with the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. She has written widely in academic journals on topics in psychiatry and medicine, and has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in numerous magazines and journals. Dr. Satel is author of Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (AEI Press, 1999) and PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001), and is coauthor, with Christina Hoff Sommers, of One Nation under Therapy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

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