Michael A. Arbib
Michael A. Arbib is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, as well as a Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC). The thrust of his work is expressed in the title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics. The brain is not a computer in the current technological sense, but he has based his career on the argument that we can learn much about machines from studying brains, and much about brains from studying machines. In 1983 he and Mary Hesse delivered the Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology at the University of Edinburgh, since published as The Construction of Reality, providing a coherent epistemology for both individual and social knowledge. His current research focuses on mechanisms underlying the coordination of perception and action, working closely with the experimental findings of neuroscientists on mechanisms for eye-hand coordination in humans and monkeys. He is now using his insights into the monkey brain to develop a new theory of the evolution of human language. Arbib is the author or editor of more than 30 books. Neural Organization: Structure, Function, and Dynamics, co-authored with Peter Erdi and the late John Szentgothai, provides a comprehensive view of the working of the brain.

 

Caleb Finch
Caleb Finch is ARCO/ Keischnick Professor of Gerontology and Biological Science, as well as Director of the Gerontology Research Institute at the University of Southern California. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale in 1961, where he majored in biophysics. He continued his work in cell biology and received his Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in 1969. Dr. Finch has received most of the major awards in biomedical gerontology, including the Robert W. Kleemeier Award of the Gerontological Society of America in 1985, the Sandoz Premier Prize by the International Geriatric Association in 1995, and the Irving Wright Award of AFAR and the Research Award of AGE in 1999. He has directed the NIA-funded Alzheimer Disease Research Center since 1984. Dr. Finch became a University Professor in 1989, an honor held by seven other professors at USC who contribute to multiple fields. Dr. Finch is a member of ten editorial boards and has written over 350 articles. In 1990 he published a major intellectual synthesis of aging: Longevity, Senescence, and the Genome. His latest book, co-authored with Thomas Kirkwood was published by Oxford in 2000: Chance, Development, and Aging.

 

Moshe Lazar
Moshe Lazar is Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Italian, and Spanish at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne (Paris), and Diplomado de Filología Hispánica at the University of Salamanca (Spain). Moshe Lazar has authored pioneering studies in the field of Provençal literature: Amour Courtois et Fin'Amors; Bernard de Ventadour; Lo Jutgamen General. He is currently engaged in a long term project of publishing critical editions of Spanish and Judeo-Spanish biblical and para-biblical texts, having hitherto brought to light 15 volumes, among them: The Ladino Pentateuch (1547) and Biblia Ladinada (15th c., 2 vols.). He has translated into French an anthology of modern Hebrew poetry and five medieval plays in addition to translating into Hebrew twelve plays from French, Spanish and Italian. Lazar has published numerous articles on the devil and hell in medieval drama, on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, on courtly literature and modern theatre. He is currently working on two major projects: a critical edition of the Alba Bible (1427-1430); and a study of verbal and visual anti-Jewish propaganda: Satan's Synagogue: The Dehumanization of Jews. He also serves as a Research Associate at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

Donald E. Miller (Co-Principal Investigator)
Donald E. Miller is the Firestone Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He is also the Executive Director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC as well as a professor of religion and sociology. He is a third generation native of Southern California and has been teaching courses in the sociology of religion at USC since 1975. He is the author/editor of seven books, including Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope (University of California Press, forthcoming in 2003), GenX Religion (Routledge, 2000), Reinventing American Protestantism (University of California Press, 1997), Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (University of California Press, 1993), Homeless Families: The Struggle for Dignity (University of Illinois Press, 1993), Writing and Research in Religious Studies (Prentice Hall, 1992), and The Case for Liberal Christianity (Harper & Row, 1981). He has had major grants from the Lilly Endowment, The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Ford Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, Haynes Foundation, the California Council for the Humanities, and Fieldstead Company. He is currently writing a book on global Pentecostalism, based on interviews and observations in twenty developing countries (to be published by the University of California Press).

 

Stephen Toulmin
Stephen Toulmin is University Professor at the University of Southern California. He studied at the University of Cambridge, where he wrote a thesis that won him a Research Fellowship at King’s College, and was also published by the University Press as The Place of Reason in Ethics. Following it came two small books on The Philosophy of Science and Foresight and Understanding, and a more substantial work called The Uses of Argument, which still finds a market among students of Communication and Argumentation. Professor Toulmin has taught at Oxford University, Leeds University, N.Y.U. & Columbia Universities, Nuffield Foundation (London), Brandeis University, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and has been at USC since 1993.

His work has focused on the History of Science: first, in three books on The Ancestry of Science, and then a long work called Human Understanding. More recently, he wrote (with Allan Janik) the history of ideas, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, and (with A.R. Jonsen) a “history of moral reasoning” arising from some 15 years of work on the ethics of medicine called The Abuse of Casuistry. Finally, he has brought these threads together in a history of renaissance thought (Cosmopolis) and a philosophical discussion of “modernity” (Return to Reason).

 

Firdaus Udwadia (Co-Principal Investigator)
Firdaus Udwadia is Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Southern California where he has served in this capacity since 1983. He also holds joint appointments at USC with the Marshall School of Business, and the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.S. in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Professor Udwadia’s research areas include: Applied Mechanics and Analytical Dynamics with particular emphasis on motion of constrained structure / mechanical systems, variational methods and optimal control and nonlinear dynamical systems and control; Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering with emphasis on the characteristics of strong ground motion; structural response and control; linear and nonlinear structural analysis and parametric and nonparametric structural identifiction. Computational Methods with emphasis on iterative methods for large-scale structural systems; optimization methods and dynamic programming and computation of lyapunov exponents for NL systems and Collaborative Engineering Design with emphasis on socio-technical framework for collaborative design; decision analysis and engineering management and conflict and crisis management. He is currently editor of the Journal of Aerospace Engineering, ASCE, and Associate Editor of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, Applied Mathematics and Computation, Mathematical Problems in Engineering, the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, and Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Science.

 

Ruth Weisberg
Ruth Weisberg, is Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. As an artist Weisberg works primarily in painting, drawing and large-scale installations. A documentary entitled Ruth Weisberg: On the Journey by Laura Vazquez was released in April, 2003 and won a Gold Medal at the Aurora Film and Video Festival. Recent honors include Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, Hebrew Union College, 2001, College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art Award 1999, Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome 1995, 1994 and 1992, National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar 1994, a Senior Research Fulbright for Italy in 1992, School of Art University of Michigan Distinguished Alumni/AE Award for 1992; Weisberg was also President of the College Art Association 1990-92.

As an artist, Weisberg has been a particularly active exhibitor with over seventy solo and 160 group exhibitions. Her work is included in sixty major Museum and University collections. Weisberg has written over fifty articles and reviews as well as several book chapters. She was chosen as the artist for the Central Conference of American Rabbi’s (the Reform Movement) new Haggadah, which is now in its second printing. An exhibition of drawings for “The Open Door Haggadah,” has been shown at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and New York and is currently traveling nationally. It will be at Brandeis University in the Spring of 2004.

 

Dallas Willard
Dallas Willard is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, and was Director of the School of Philosophy from 1982-1985. He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin (Madison, 1960-1965), and has held visiting appointments at UCLA (1969) and the University of Colorado (1984). His undergraduate studies were at William Jewell College, Tennessee Temple College (B.A., 1956, Psychology) and Baylor University (B.A., 1957, Philosophy and Religion); and his Graduate education was at Baylor University and the University of Wisconsin (Ph. D., 1964: Major in Philosophy, Minor in the History of Science).

His philosophical publications are mainly in the areas of epistemology, the philosophy of mind and of logic, and on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, including extensive translations of Husserl's early writings from German into English. His Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge, a study of Husserl's early philosophy, appeared in 1984.
He also lectures and publishes in religion: Renovation of the Heart was published in April 2002, The Divine Conspiracy was released in 1998 and selected Christianity Today's "Book of the Year" for 1999. The Spirit of the Disciplines appeared in 1988, and Hearing God (1999) first appeared as In Search of Guidance in 1984 (2nd edition 1993).