Round 1 Award Recipients

Conrad Hackett is associate director of research and senior demographer at Pew Research Center. His expertise is in international religious demography, sociology of religion, and how religion relates to characteristics including gender, fertility and education. He is an author of The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050, Religion and Education Around the World, The Global Religious Landscape, The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World, Global Christianity, The Global Catholic Population and various other studies of religious demography.

Jibum Kim is the director of the survey research center and an associate professor of sociology at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. He is principal investigator of the Korean General Social Survey (KGSS) and a General Secretary of the East Asian Social Survey (EASS). The KGSS, established in 2003, is the Korean version of the American GSS and aims to understand changes in attitudes in Korea. The EASS, collected since 2006, is a collaboration of GSS type surveys in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan and has promoted comparative studies of East Asia.

Neha Sahgal is associate director of research at Pew Research Center, specializing in international polling, particularly on topics related to interreligious relations and political Islam. Before joining the Pew Research Center, Sahgal worked at The Asia Foundation in San Francisco. She received her doctorate in government and politics, with a concentration in the comparative politics of the Middle East and South Asia, from The University of Maryland in 2008. She is an author of studies on the religious beliefs and practices of Muslims around the world, Christian-Muslim relations in sub-Saharan Africa and religion in Latin America.

Anna Sun, Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kenyon College, is currently a Berggruen Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. Her research focuses on conceptual and methodological issues in the study of Chinese religions. Her book Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton: 2013) received the "Distinguished Book Award" from the Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association, and the "Best First Book in the History of Religion Award" from the American Academy of Religion. A Co-Chair of the Chinese Religions section of the American Academy of Religion, Sun is working on her new book The Social Life of Prayer in Contemporary China.

Thomas Holtgraves is a professor of Psychological Science at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He conducts interdisciplinary research into multiple facets of language and social psychology and is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Social Psychology.

Magda Giordano is Professor at the Instituto de Neurobiologia of the National University of Mexico (UNAM), and currently works on Neuropragmatics using behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Her previous published research includes studies on animal models of injury, transplantation, behavioral pharmacology and neurotoxicology.

Patrick McNamara is Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University School of Medicine and Professor Northcentral University. He is co-founder of Institute for biocultural Study of Religion and the journal "Religion, Brain and Behavior". He is the author of "Neuroscience of religious experience (CUP, 2009) and numerous other papers and books in the scientific study of religion.

Danielle N. Lussier is an assistant professor in political science at Grinnell College, Iowa. Her research focuses on democratization, public opinion and political participation, and religion and politics, which a particular emphasis on Eurasia and Indonesia. Lussier is the author of Constraining Elites in Russia and Indonesia: Political Participation and Regime Survival (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Muhammad Najib Azca is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Gadjah Mada in Indonesia and currently the Head of the Graduate Program of Sociology, and the Director of the Youth Studies Centre. He earned his PhD from the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on youth radicalism and post-conflict violence in Indonesia.

Mohammad Iqbal Ahnaf is a faculty member at the Centre for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS) Graduate School, Gadjah Mada University. He earned a Master degree in conflict transformation at the Centre for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University (USA) and Ph.D. in Strategic Studies, Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). His works cover various topics on religion, violence and peaceful coexistence. He is the author of The Image of the Enemy: Radical Discourse in Indonesia (2006), a dissertation titled From Revolution to Refolution: Hizb al-Tahrir: Its Changes and Trajectories in Democratic Context of Indonesia (2011), a working paper titled Contesting Morality Youth Piety and Pluralism in Indonesia (2012). He recently completed an article, "Little China in a Javanese Muslim Town: How the Culture of Coexistence Survived Communal Tensions." He serves as a country coordinator of Democracy (V-Dem), in international research collaboration for creating an alternative democracy index co-hosted by the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Iqba's role in this project is administered by the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg.

Hakimul Ikhwan in on faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Gadjah Mada in Indonesia. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex in 2015, and was a research fellow at the Kennedy school of Government at Harvard in 2013 - 2014. He studies conflict and security in Indonesia.

Anjana Narayan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Sociology at California State Polytechnic University Pomona. Her areas of interest include ethnicity, gender and migration. She is the co-author of Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslims Asian American Women Narrate their Experiences (2009) and co-editor of Research Beyond Borders: Interdisciplinary Reflections (2012)

Bandana Purkayastha is a Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research on the intersections of gender/racism/class/age; transnationalism; violence and peace; and human rights has appeared in eleven books and over fifty articles and chapters since 2000. She was most recently awarded the 2016 American Sociological Association Contribution to the Field Award, which recognizes scholars who have worked to build the fields of Asian, and/or Asian American Studies within their institutions and the discipline at large.

Durre Sameen Ahmed is the Chairperson and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Culture in Lahore, Pakistan. Ahmed’s research focus is the socio-psychological, transnational, and cultural dimensions of Islam and Muslims. She is an contributing author and editor of Gendering the Spirit: Women, Religion and the Postcolonial Response. (London, ZED books, 2002).

Neela Bhattacharya Saxena is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at Nassau Community College in New York. She is the author of Absent Mother God of the West: A Kali Lover's Journey into Christianity and Judaism and In the Beginning IS Desire: Tracing Kali's Footprints in Indian Literature. She writes a blog called "Stand Under the Mother Principle".

Asha Mukherjee is a Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Visva-Bharat, Central University in Santiniketan, India. She is also the Founder-Director of the Women's Studies Center there. Her areas of specialization are Analytic Ethics, Applied Ethics, Logic, Jaina Philosophy and Religion and Gender Studies. She has edited numerous books and published more than 50 articles in Indian and International journals.

Farhan Navid Yousaf is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, Pakistan. He was a Fulbright PhD scholar (2011-16) in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, USA. Farhan has extensive research experience in the areas of gender, human rights, human trafficking, and transnational migration.

Rachel Rinaldo is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her interests include gender, culture, religion, globalization, and qualitative methods. Her recent book, Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia (Oxford 2013), is an ethnographic study of Muslim and secular women activists in the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

Eva Nisa is currently Lecturer of Religious Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Australian National University in 2013. Before commencing her current position, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Amsterdam for the Problematising ‘Muslim Marriages’ project, focusing on unregistered marriage, online siri (secret) marriage, temporary marriage, and online Shari’a-compliant matchmaking platforms. Her other research interests are social media and da’wa(proselytisation), face-veiled women and Muslim activism, Muslim youth, Muslim fashion, migrant domestic workers, Muslim refugees and philanthropy.

Nina Nurmila is a Senior Lecturer at UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung (the State Islamic University), Indonesia. Her first degree was from UIN Bandung (1992), her MA was from Murdoch University (1997) and her PhD was from the University of Melbourne (2007). She is the author of Women, Islam and Everyday Life: Renegotiating Polygamy in Indonesia (London; New York: Routledge, 2009&2011).

Kimberly Rios is an Associate Professor and Director of Experimental Training in the Department of Psychology at Ohio University. She received her PhD from Stanford University and previously held faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on how individuals respond to stereotypes about and threats to their group identities, particularly their religious (or non-religious) identities.

Mark Aveyard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. He earned his PhD in Psychology from Florida State University. He studies religious and moral behavior.