Speaker biographies
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 AEI. He is the 1994 recipient of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Mr. Novak has written twenty-seven 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 forthcoming book is No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers (Doubleday, 2008). For his work and influence, he has received many international awards.
Henry Olsen is a vice president and director of the National Research Initiative (NRI) at AEI. He disseminates and publicizes the Institute’s work to the academic community; works with AEI’s visiting, adjunct, and NRI research fellows; commissions and supervises NRI projects; and oversees the production of NRI publications. Mr. Olsen previously served as vice president for programs at the Manhattan Institute and as a judicial clerk to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Danny J. Boggs.
William D. Phillips is an American physicist whose experiments using laser light to cool and trap atoms earned him (jointly with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji) the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997. In 1978, Mr. Phillips joined the staff of the National Bureau of Standards—now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—where he conducted his award-winning research. Building on Steven Chu’s work, Mr. Phillips developed new and improved methods for measuring the temperature of laser-cooled atoms. In 1988, he discovered that the atoms reached a temperature six times lower than the predicted theoretical limit. Mr. Cohen-Tannoudji refined the theory to explain the new results, and he and Mr. Phillips further investigated methods of trapping atoms cooled to even lower temperatures. Mr. Phillips is currently a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and a fellow at the Joint Quantum Institute, a cooperative venture of the university and NIST.
Gary Rosen is the chief external affairs officer at the John Templeton Foundation. As head of the communications team, he directs a global effort to raise awareness of the foundation’s role as a philanthropic catalyst for research on the “big questions” of science and human meaning. He oversees the foundation’s strategic planning for use of the Internet, traditional media, in-house publications, conferences, and other events. Before joining the foundation, Mr. Rosen spent more than a decade as an editor at Commentary, where his articles covered a range of subjects, from constitutional law and bioethics to Hollywood blockbusters and American foreign policy. Mr. Rosen regularly contributes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He was previously the senior editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a speechwriter for Governor Thomas Kean of New Jersey.
Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, the executive director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology, and an adjunct professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University. Mr. Shermer has written many books, including The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books, 2007); Why Darwin Matters: The Case against Intelligent Design (Holt, 2007); and Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown (Holt, 2005).
View Event Details
