b a t t e n a b o u t
James Childress
• University Professor • Professor of Religious Studies and Public Policy Childress has previously been the Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University (1975-79) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Princeton University. In 1990, he was named Professor of the Year in the Commonwealth of Virginia by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and in 2002 he received the University of Virginia’s highest honor—the Thomas Jefferson Award. In spring 2010, he held the Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the Library of Congress. Childress is the author of numerous articles and several books in several areas of ethics, including Principles of Biomedical Ethics (with Tom Beauchamp), now in its 6th edition and translated into several languages. He was vice chair of the national Task Force on Organ Transplantation, and he also has served on the Board of Directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, the Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee, the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee, and several Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for NIH clinical trials. He was a member of the presidentially-appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission (1996-2001). He now chairs the Health Sciences Policy Board for the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science. His current research focuses on public bioethics, on public health ethics, and on just-war theory and practice. Childress received his BA from Guilford College, his BD from Yale Divinity School, and his MA and PhD from Yale University.
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Eileen Chou
Benjamin Converse
• Assistant Professor of Public Policy
• Assistant Professor of Public Policy and
Chou received her PhD in management and organization from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and holds an MS in social science from Caltech and a BA in psychology and economics from UCLA. Chou’s research focuses on the organizational, social, and psychological forces that shape individual and group behavior in organizational settings. She explores questions such as how the terms of contracts promote or inhibit cooperation among team members, whether and when hierarchy is an effective mechanism of social organization, how trust can be used as a strategic tactic, and whether or not it really is “lonely at the top.” Chou’s work has appeared in academic journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American Economics Journal, Experimental Economics, and Organizational Psychological Review. Her research on prosocial behaviors has been selected to be featured in “the Best Paper Proceedings” by the Organizational Behavior division at the 2010 conference of the Academy of Management.
Psychology Converse studies social psychology and the psychology of judgment & decision making. He investigates basic psychological processes—motivation, social judgment, and inferences about others’ mental states—that have critical implications for management, leadership, and policy. Much of his work focuses on the question of how and when people can think beyond “the here and now.” For example, how do we balance our own selfish impulses with the good of the group? How do we forgo immediate temptations in favor of future goals? How do we get beyond our own psychological perspective to infer others’ thoughts, feelings, and opinions about the world? He is primarily interested in how these thought processes lead to decisions and behaviors that either promote or destroy stable social systems. His teaching experience ranges from undergraduate education in psychology to MBA and executive education in management, decision making, and negotiations. Converse’s work has been published in journals such as Psychological Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as edited volumes such as the Handbook of Self-Regulation and discussed in popular press outlets such as Scientific American, US News and World Reports, The New York Times, and BBC News. Converse received his BA in psychological and brain sciences with high honors from Dartmouth College in 2004 and then spent a semester as an honorary visiting researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Birmingham (UK). Following this, he joined the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he received his PhD from the Managerial and Organizational Behavior program.
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