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. 

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) (http://books.google.com/books/p/eerdmans?id=2NCvZWNkQxkC&dq=Stanley); and The Cambridge History of Christianity volume 8: World Christianities c. 1815- c. 1914 (with Sheridan Gilley, 2006) (http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521814560). With Robert Eric Frykenberg he is co-editor of the Eerdmans series, Studies in the History of Christian Missions. He is currently completing for that series a major study of the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910, to be published by Eerdmans in 2008, 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.

Having edited two volumes on the effects of the racial schism in America, What Happened to the Urban Crisis? and Divided Neighborhoods, Dr. Tobin has targeted racial and religious prejudice in America as a key concern. He has written books and monographs on anti-Semitism, including Jewish Perceptions of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Semitic Beliefs in the United States. His writings on prejudice in America's educational system include The UnCivil University: Politics and Propaganda in American Education, A Profile of American College Faculty vol. 1: Political Beliefs & Behavior, and A Profile of American College Faculty vol. 2: Religious Beliefs & Behavior. He is presently completing a volume entitled The Twisted Textbook, an examination of anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism that saturate elementary and secondary school reading materials.

Dr. Tobin's Jewish demography and Jewish identity texts include Ethnic and Racial Diversity in the Jewish Community, Rabbis Talk About Intermarriage, and Opening the Gates: How Proactive Conversion Can Revitalize the Jewish Community. He also writes about organized religion in America, having completed two works this arena, Church and Synagogue Affiliation and The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States.

His work on philanthropy is extensive, with two monographs currently underway. The first concerns mega-gifts in higher education, the second, giving patterns of Jewish foundations. Among his previous publications are Mega-Gifts in American Philanthropy: General & Jewish Giving Patterns Between 1995-2000 and The Transition of Communal Values and Behavior in Jewish Philanthropy.

Gary and his wife Diane live in San Francisco. They have six children, Adam, 37; Amy, 33; Sarah, 32; Aryeh, 28; Mia, 25 and Jonah, 10.

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.