Lumen Christi Institute

Michael Coates is Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Chair of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. He is also a Research Associate in Geology at the Field Museum of Natural History. Prof. Coates holds a PhD from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. His research focuses on vertebrate evolution, especially the origins of ray-finned fishes, the ancient relatives of the vast majority of fishes swimming the seas today. He is co-founder and deputy editor of the journal Evolution and Development and he is on the editorial board of The Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental.

Eric Elshtain is the first ever poet-in-residence at the Field Museum. He has taught poetry and other subjects through the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Hands on Stanzas program, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and the Better Boys Foundation. His poetry, reviews and interviews have been published in such journals as the Notre Dame Review, McSweeney’s, American Letters & Commentary, among many others.  His book, Here In Premonition, was published in 2006. His most recent book, This Thin Memory A-ha, was published by Verge Books. Additionally, Eric is the editor of the on-line poetry press Beard of Bees. He received his PhD in Poetry from the University of Chicago.

Robert Scherrer is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University.  He received his PhD in physics from the University of Chicago. His research area is cosmology, encompassing work on dark energy, dark matter, big bang nucleosynthesis, and the large-scale structure of the universe.  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2001), and among other awards is the recipient of the Klopsteg Memorial Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers (2011) and The Ohio State University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching (1999). He is the author of Quantum Mechanics: An Accessible Introduction (Addison-Wesley, 2006). He has also published several popular science articles and science fiction short stories. Prof. Scherrer is a Director and co-founder of the Society of Catholic Scientists.

Lisa Sideris is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, where she also received a PhD in 2000. Prof. Sideris's areas of research include environmental ethics and the environmental humanities and the science-religion interface. Her first book Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection critiques the tendency of Christian environmental ethics, or “ecological theology,” to misconstrue or ignore Darwinian theory, and examines the problems this creates for developing a realistic ethic toward nature and animals. She has also co-edited a volume of interdisciplinary essays on early environmentalist Rachel Carson, and her most recent book, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World, examines how scientific rhetoric and narratives about wonder actually pit science against religion, and encourage a devaluation of the natural world.