Research and Policy Advisory Committee

Currently Managing Director at Humanity United, overseeing the Peacebuilding & Conflict Transformation portfolio, Melanie Cohen Greenberg, JD was previously President and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Before this, she worked in both philanthropic and academic settings and has helped design and facilitate public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the Caucasus. She has taught advanced courses in international conflict resolution, multi-party conflict resolution, and negotiation and is a writer, lecturer, teacher and trainer.

Joshua D. Greene, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology and member of the Center for Brain Science faculty at Harvard University. He has studied behavioral and neuroscientific methods to study moral judgment and, more recently, examined thought formation and its manipulation into reasoning and imagination in the brain. He is the author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Currently a Research Specialist at the Curry School of Education, Lynn Kunkle, Ph.D. previously served as the Director of Philanthropic Research and Impact at the El-Hibri Foundation and has worked for over two decades as a specialist in interfaith peacebuilding, conflict resolution and capacity building. With over ten years living in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, she has worked with government, religious and civil society leaders on a range of inter-religious peacebuilding issues. As Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University, she taught Islamic approaches to peace and conflict resolution to religious leaders and organized interfaith dialogues.

Rose McDermott, Ph.D., is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and M.A. in Experimental Social Psychology from Stanford University and has taught at Cornell, UCSB and Harvard. She has held multiple fellowships at Harvard and Stanford University, and is the author of five books and hundreds of academic articles across a wide variety of disciplines.

Philip Rubin, Ph.D., is the CEO emeritus and former Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories.  He is an adjunct professor, research affiliate and fellow at Yale University and has served in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, led the White House neuroscience initiative, and was a senior advisor on national policy. He is a fellow of many organizations and an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering and the National Academy of Public Administration.

Rebecca Saxe is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of BCS and an associate member of the McGovern Institute. Saxe received her BA from Oxford University, and her Ph.D. from MIT. Before joining the faculty, she was a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Saxe has authored peer-reviewed papers on the cognitive neuroscience of social cognition, Theory of Mind, and moral judgment. Her TED talk has been viewed millions of times, and has been translated into 33 languages. She was recently named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Linda R. Tropp, Ph.D., is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more than two decades she has studied how members of different groups experience contact with each other, and how group differences in status affect cross-group relations. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, Tropp has received distinguished research and teaching awards from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the International Society of Political Psychology. She has worked with national organizations on court cases relevant to racial integration, on national initiatives to improve interracial relations in schools, and with non-governmental organizations to evaluate applied programs designed to reduce racial conflict. Dr. Tropp is coauthor of When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact (2011).