Jordan Grafman

Jordan Grafman is the Director of Brain Injury Research and Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the Shirley Ryan Abilitylab, the number one Rehabilitation Hospital in the United States based on U.S. News & World Report surveys. He also holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, and adjunct appointments in the Departments of Neurology, Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Center, and Department of Psychiatry in the Feinberg School of Medicine as well as in the Department of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois. 

He began his professional career as a Captain in the United States Air Force assigned to Phase 2 of the William S. Caveness Vietnam Head Injury Study being conducted at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He subsequently moved to the National Institutes of Health where he conducted research as Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for over two decades. He then left to briefly join the Kessler Institute of Rehabilitation in New Jersey before leaving for his current positions in his hometown of Chicago.

He is co-editor of the journal CORTEX and has co-edited numerous books on cognitive neuroscience issues, including topics related to the functions of the human frontal lobes, human beliefs, traumatic brain injury and the Handbook of Neuropsychology. He is a past recipient of the Humboldt Research Award from Germany and several awards from the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health. He has published over 500 articles and his h-index of 133 reflecting article citation strength is among the highest in the field of cognitive neuroscience. In his 30 years of research in cognitive neuroscience, he has had extensive experience overseeing and leading large complex scientific and biomedical projects including the Vietnam Head Injury Study and a project on Frontotemporal degeneration.

Patrick McNamara

Patrick McNamara is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northcentral University. He also holds appointments in the departments of Neurology at the University of Minnesota and Boston University School of Medicine. He is a founding editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior, the flagship journal for the emerging field of neuroscience of religion. He is a co-founder (along with Professor Wesley Wildman) of the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of the neurologic and evolutionary correlates of religious beliefs, behaviors, and practices. Until 2018, he was based for 20 years at the Boston University School of Medicine.

He is the editor of Where God and Science Meet and Science and World Religions, and the author of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Religion, Neuroscience and the Self: A New Personalism (Routledge, 2020), and numerous publications on the neurology and psychology of religion. He is a past recipient of a John Templeton Foundation award on the “Neurology of religious cognition.” A largely expanded second edition of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press) is due out summer of 2022.

In his 25 years of research in the biomedical sciences, he has had extensive experience overseeing and leading large complex scientific and biomedical projects. He was project leader for 3 separate NIH grants in the last 10 years. He has also been a merit Review Award Recipient in the VA Medical System.

John Balch

John Balch utilizes tools drawn from computational social science and the cognitive sciences to analyze the evolution of religious ideologies over time, particularly as individuals respond to the challenges posed by climate change. He is a Doctoral Candidate in Religion at Boston University and a Lindamood Fellow at the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts. John is currently working with Dr. Patrick McNamara on the John Templeton Foundation Project on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition. This project is the first of its kind to fund a large stream of focused neuroscientific research on religion coordinated across multiple labs. This project will be investigating the relationship between dreaming and religious cognition using cutting-edge EEG technology that enables data collection in a naturalistic setting.

Isabel Davidson

Isabel Davidson holds a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science and a Master of Arts in Cognitive Linguistics, both from Case Western Reserve University. Isabel focused her degree on propaganda and deception, applying this knowledge to political conflicts with op-eds and presentations. Her Master’s thesis explored demographic differences in deception by looking at police interrogations of later-convicted felons. Isabel is currently a research assistant on the John Templeton Foundation Project on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago, Illinois.

Rachel Raider

Rachel Raider earned her BA from The Evergreen State College where she had the unique opportunity to study lucid dream research, originally focused on cognitive induction techniques. Exploration into mindfulness inspired her to design a method for managing symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, primarily nightmares, with a combination of lucid dreaming and mind/body awareness training. For her research capstone project, she created and conducted a lucid dream induction study online. Since graduating, Rachel has been collaborating on various dream research projects and attending the annual International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) conferences, where she serves on the Board of Directors. Recently, Rachel replicated her lucid dream induction study at the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory with a grant from the DreamScience Foundation. She is very excited to be contributing to the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition project.

Chanel Reed

Chanel Reed holds a Master of Arts in Psychology from Northern Arizona University. During her time in that program she was selected from a candidate pool to be the Advanced Neuroscience Lab Instructor due to her aptitude and passion for that area of the field. In that position she taught the Advanced Neuroscience students, created exams, and led sheep brain dissections for the purpose of teaching brain anatomy. Chanel taught two courses at Coconino Community College — Introduction to Psychology and Biological Psychology. After teaching, Chanel gained four years of administration experience as a Medical Office Manager before returning to higher education as an Academic and Finance Advisor at Northcentral University. Chanel spent two years in a leadership role for NCU Advising and in 2022 was selected to serve as the Research Project Coordinator for the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition at NCU. She is thrilled to be involved in such fascinating and important work.

Joni Keith

Joni Keith joins our team with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Physics from Cumberland College, a Master of Science degree in Mathematics and Statistics from Clemson University, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Psychology from Northcentral University. She began her career at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory performing human health risk assessments and later settled into the role of statistical consultant. During that time, she also completed her dissertation research study, “Teachers’ Thriving, Job Satisfaction, and Burnout: A Polynomial Regression with Response Surface Analysis.” She offers 30 years of experience as a corporate statistician and is pleased to have the opportunity to utilize her skills on a variety of projects with Dr. Grafman and Dr. McNamara.