Resident & Non-Resident Scholars

Current major initiatives include: 

• capturing drug and adverse event data on more than twenty-five million seniors for use in the FDA's new post-market drug safety efforts;
• evaluating the comparative risks of imported food and drugs, with an eye toward better allocation of limited inspection resources overseas;
• accelerating molecular diagnostics and genetically personalized health care;
• formulating a national health IT strategy, including rewarding doctors for delivering higher-quality care via electronic health records; and
• sizing and developing strategies to combat waste, fraud, and abuse across the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

In addition, Sasse takes a special interest in efforts to modernize payment systems in American health care to eventually migrate from "paying for more" to "paying for better," in ways that will stimulate greater entrepreneurial innovation among doctors, hospitals, and adjacent industries. 

Sasse is on leave from a public policy professorship at the Lyndon B. Johnson School at the University of Texas.  Previously, he served as chief of staff to U.S. Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (Nebraska 01). Prior to that, he was chief of staff to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant.  Sasse began his career with the Boston Consulting Group and has advised a wide variety of organizations at moments of strategic crisis – working with airlines, utilities, major manufacturers, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and a number of nonprofit and educational institutions.  While at the U.S. Department of Justice, he received the Attorney General’s Special Act Award for helping “manage White House and inter-agency communications related to the creation of a National Intelligence Director” structure.

A Nebraska native and historian by training, Sasse was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and St. John's (Annapolis) before receiving his Ph.D. from Yale.  His doctoral dissertation on domestic politics during the Cold War won both the Theron Rockwell Field Prize and the George Washington Egleston Prize.  He and his wife, Melissa McLeod Sasse, have two daughters. 

Dr. Sherman is the author of various resource guides for faith leaders, including Establishing a Church-based, Welfare-to-Work Ministry: A Practical How-To Manual and Sharing God’s Heart for the Poor: Meditations for Worship, Prayer, and Service. She has also published the first major study of faith-based intermediary organizations (2002) and the largest national survey of Hispanic church-based community ministries in the U.S. (2003). She is a leading national expert on charitable choice, has served as an advisor to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and is the author of The Charitable Choice Handbook for Ministry Leaders. Dr. Sherman provides on-site consulting services to congregations starting or enhancing their community ministries and is a frequent speaker at training conferences for faith-based practitioners. In 2004, Sherman assumed responsibility for the national ele:Vate project, a multi-partner initiative that seeks to equip urban youth workers to cultivate economic literacy among the young people they serve.

Sherman is the founder and former Executive Director of Charlottesville Abundant Life Ministries, a faith-based nonprofit assisting low-income, inner-city families. She is an active member of  Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia and also serves as a Senior Fellow for the International Justice Mission. She received her undergraduate degree in Political Science in 1987 from Messiah College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia (1994).

A broad set of assessment techniques are used in our research. These include personality, neuropsychological and psychophysiological (e.g., event-related potentials, heart rate) measures. Study participants are recruited and referred from a number of agencies and institutions including domestic violence treatment programs, local mental health clinics, probation/parole and substance abuse treatment programs. The laboratory has a collaborative relationship with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and is presently funded by the Dreyfus Health Foundation.

He has written or edited six books:"The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries" (1990); "The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792-1992" (1992); "The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799-1999" (with Kevin Ward, 2000); "Christian Missions and the Enlightenment" (2001); "Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire" (2003); and "The Cambridge History of Christianity volume 8: World Christianities c. 1815- c. 1914" (with Sheridan Gilley, 2006) .

With Robert Eric Frykenberg he is co-editor of the Eerdmans series, Studies in the History of Christian Missions. He recently completed for that series a major study of the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, published by Eerdmans in 2009, and is working on a history of evangelicalism from 1945 to 2000.

His early research was in the area of church-sect theory, particularly with respect to denominationalism, with a revision of his doctoral dissertation being published by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion as Into Denominationalism: The Anglican Metamorphosis. He also was a Fulbright lecturer and later published, with Loftur R. Gissurarson, Icelandic Spiritualism: Mediumship and Modernity in Iceland. In social theory, Dr. Swatos has had an abiding interest in the work of Max Weber, most recently exemplified in the collection he edited with Lutz Kaelber, in observance of the centennary of Weber's innovation of the concept, The Protestant Ethic turns 100. His more recent empirical research has been in the area of pilgrimage and tourism, where he has published two volumes of collected studies.

Anna Sun's research interests include sociology of religion, sociology of knowledge, classical and contemporary social theory, and sociology of East Asia. Her dissertation is entitled Confusions over Confucianism: The Making of Confucianism as a World Religion and the Emergence of Comparative Religion as a Discipline, 1870-1915. She has presented her research at many conferences (ASA, ASR, SSHA, SSSR and AAS), and one of the chapters of her thesis, "The Fate of Confucianism as a Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes," can be found in the edited volume State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies (Brill, 2005).

At Kenyon College, Anna Sun has taught Classical Social Theory (Fall 2005) and Sociology of Knowledge (Spring 2006). In 2006-2007 she will be teaching the following courses: Classical Social Theory, French Social Theory, and Knowledge of the Other: Journey to the East (cross-listed with Asian Studies).

Starting in 1987, his social marketing research has focused on promoting healthy lifestyles, particularly abstinence among adolescents. Dr. Tanner's research on social marketing has won awards from the American Marketing Association, the Society for Marketing Advances, and others. He has published nearly sixty research articles in various journals, most recently the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Health Marketing Quarterly, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Psychology & Marketing.

Some current research programs include studies on the use of behavioral measures to assess gratitude, the relationship between similarity and gratitude, the use of moral rationalization in forgiveness, forgiveness in the context of domestic abuse, and the relationship between religion and implicit measures of prejudice.

Dr. Ulmer teaches courses such as undergraduate courses such as Criminology, Sociology of Deviance, Social Psychology, and Criminal Justice, and graduate courses such as Criminological Theory, Sentencing and Corrections, and Symbolic Interactionism.