Leadership

Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and Chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. He writes about American constitutional law, politics and history and American political thought. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Atlantic, among other outlets, and he is a regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog. He is the author of several books, including Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech and Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.

Lara Buchak is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Her book Risk and Rationality (2013) concerns how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions. It vindicates the ordinary decision-maker from the point of view of even ideal rationality. A significant upshot of her view is that individuals with different attitudes towards risk—considered as different ways to weight worse scenarios against better ones—can all be rational. Her research following the book has focused on applications of her view to ethics, arguing that we ought to defer to individuals’ risk-attitudes in biomedical research; that we ought to weight worse scenarios very heavily in setting climate policy; and that we ought to care a great deal about the interests of the worse-off when acting ethically. Another ongoing project is on the nature and rationality of faith, both in the religious and mundane sense. She argues that faith requires stopping one’s search for evidence and making a commitment–and maintaining one’s commitment in the face of counterevidence. She details when such faith is rational, and how it is beneficial to human life. Other topics she has written on include group decision-making; the relationship between assigning probability to a hypothesis and believing that hypothesis outright; and the nature of free will. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009.  She spent 12 years in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley before returning to Princeton.

Donald Downs is the Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science Emeritus, and the Affiliate Professor of Law, and Journalism Emeritus at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University. In addition, he was the director and co-founder of the University’s Wisconsin Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy (2007-present), and director of the University’s Legal Studies Program and its Center for the Study of Law, Society, and Justice (2004-7). He was president (and former secretary) of the independent and non-partisan faculty group, the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights, one of the nation’s leading campus academic freedom and free speech groups (secretary 1996-2000, president since 2000-2016). His scholarship has dealt with a wide range of issues dealing with such issues as freedom of speech; academic freedom; American politics; political thought; political and legal movements; citizenship; campus politics; domestic violence, psychiatry, and the criminal law; and the relationship among the military, the university, and civic education. His prize-winning books include Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community and the First Amendment; The New Politics of Pornography; More than Victims: Battered Women, the Syndrome Society, and the Law; Cornell `69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University; Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus; and Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education on Non-Military Students (Cambridge University Press). He is a co-editor with Chris W. Surprenant (Philosophy, University of New Orleans) of The Value and Limits of Academic Speech (Routledge, 2018), and author of the forthcoming book, Free Speech and the Intellectual Polis: Liberal Education and the Prospect of Liberal Democracy. He has been an active defender of academic freedom on campus (where he serves as the president of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights, an independent group) and in the nation. In 2013, Downs received the national Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award for his defense of academic freedom and freedom of thought at University of Wisconsin-Madison and in higher education generally. He is also the faculty founder and advisor to the University of Wisconsin-Madison chapter of the Alexander Hamilton Society. Since retiring, Downs has been the lead faculty advisor to the Free Speech and Open Inquiry Project of the Institute for Humane Studies in Washington, D.C.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has frequently been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law, among other works. His writings have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the Columbia Law Review, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He was an undergraduate at Swarthmore and holds the degrees of M.T.S. and J.D. from Harvard University and D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He is Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.

Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and writes about family law, anti-trafficking, the regulation of sexual misconduct from international criminal law to Title IX, and the slavery legacy of her Chair.   She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton, 2006), and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy (Duke, 1999).  She coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique with Wendy Brown (Duke, 2002) and After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory with Andrew Parker (Duke, 2011), and solo-edited Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law.  With Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché, and Hila Shamir, she has published Governance Feminism: An Introduction (Minnesota 2018) and Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (Minnesota, 2019).  She holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School, and has taught at Hamilton College, Stanford Law School, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the Tel Aviv University Buchman Faculty of Law, and the Law Department of the American University of Cairo.

Anna Krylov is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California. Following postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined USC’s chemistry department in 1998. Her research is focused on theoretical and computational quantum chemistry. She develops theoretical models for open-shell and electronically excited species and investigates their role in combustion, solar energy, bioimaging, and quantum information science. Professor Krylov has received the Dirac Medal (WATOC), the Theoretical Chemistry Award (ACS/PHYS), the Bessel Research Award (Humboldt Foundation), the Mildred Dresselhaus Award (DESY and Hamburg Univ.), and the Plyler Prize for Molecular Spectroscopy & Dynamics (APS). She has also been recognized by an Inaugural WiSE Architects of Enduring Change Award, the Hanna Reisler Mentoring Award, and the Melon Mentoring Award.  Krylov is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science; an elected member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science; and a 2018 Simons Foundation Fellow in Theoretical Physics. Krylov is an associate editor of the journals Physical Chemistry-Chemical Physics and of Wires Computational Molecular Science. Born and raised in the USSR, Krylov received her M.Sc. from Moscow State University and her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Lucas E. Morel is the John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics and Head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. Prof. Morel also teaches in the Master’s Program in American History and Government at Ashland University in Ohio; lectures in summer programs for the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy; and conducts high school teacher workshops for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, John M. Ashbrook Center, Jack Miller Center, Bill of Rights Institute, and Liberty Fund. Prof. Morel is the author or editor of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government, Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages, Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man, and The New Territory: Ralph Ellison and the Twenty-First Century. His most recent book is Lincoln and the American Founding, published in 2020 for the Concise Lincoln Library Series of Southern Illinois University Press. Prof. Morel is a trustee of the Supreme Court Historical Society; former president of the Abraham Lincoln Institute; a consultant on the Library of Congress exhibits on Lincoln and the Civil War; was a member of the scholarly board of advisors for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission; and currently serves on the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which will plan activities to commemorate the founding of the United States of America. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Claremont Graduate University.

Alejandro Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and the Director of the Program in Materials Science and Engineering at Princeton University. His research focuses on nanophotonics, the study of light in structured media, where he is known for his contributions to computational and mathematical methods and to the understanding of quantum fluctuations, nonlinear optics, and nanophotonic devices. He was recently awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Young Investigator Award, and the Department of Energy Frederick A. Howes Award in Computational Science. He has Bachelors and PhD degrees in Physics from MIT and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.