our people

Elisheva Avishai is a strategist, teacher, and non-profit leader who has worked in education for more than 25 years. Avishai has consulted to school districts across the United States and Canada, with a focus on leadership development and building innovative practices. She is the founder of the I-Think Initiative at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, which teaches integrative thinking to students, teachers, and education leaders across Canada and the United States. She has an MBA from Rotman and a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard.

Fr. Maximos Constas previously served as a professor and Interim Dean of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He completed his PhD in Patristics and Historical Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (1993), after which he taught at Hellenic College and Holy Cross (1993-1998). In the fall of 1998, he was invited to join the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, where he was Professor of Patristics and Orthodox Theology from 1998-2004. Fr. Maximos resigned from his position at Harvard to respond to a life-long calling to monastic life and was tonsured a great-schema monk at the Holy Monastery of Simonopetra, where he lived from 2004-2011.

Fr Maximos is the author of Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to the Questions of Thalassios (2019); St John Chrysostom and the Jesus Prayer: A Contribution to the Study of the Philokalia (2019); and The Light of the World: Prayers to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (2020). He has also written numerous scholarly articles, including “Dionysius the Areopagite and the New Testament” in the Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite (2022); “Attentiveness and Digital Culture,” in Theology and Praxis from Late Byzantium to Modernity (2022); “The Theology of the Icon” in The Icon; and “Saints and Elders of Mount Athos” in the Routledge Handbook of Mt Athos (both forthcoming in 2023). His most recent book is a critical edition and English translation of the tenth-century Life of the Virgin Mary by John Geometres published by Harvard University Press, earlier this year.

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Professor Patrick Gray is UATX's Dean of the Center for Arts and Letters. Previously, Gray served as Director of Liberal Arts at Durham University, where he was responsible for designing and introducing a new interdisciplinary core curriculum in the humanities. Before taking up his appointment at Durham, Gray taught comparative literature at Deep Springs College and the United States Military Academy at West Point. Gray is the author of Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic, editor of Shakespeare and the Ethics of War, and co-editor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics and Shakespeare and Montaigne.

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Dr. Ryan Haecker is a theologian and philosopher whose research in systematic and historical theology explores the absolute theological questions of logic, science, and technology. He has recently been appointed as Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of Austin. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and a Research Fellow of the William Temple Foundation. He is a member of the European Academy of Religions, a reviewer for Reviews of Religion and Theology, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Religions. He was in April 2022 awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Theology and Religious Studies from Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by Rowan Williams, 'Restoring Reason: Theology of Logic in Origen of Alexandria', explores theological interpretations of logic or ‘theology of logic’ in Origen of Alexandria, for the Church Fathers, and for modern Christian theology. During his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, he will prepare to publish his doctoral dissertation in the new Alber Verlag book series on Trinitarian Ontology. He has previously studied history, philosophy, and theology at the University of Texas, the University of Würzburg, and the University of Nottingham. He has published 46 articles in journals, as book chapters, and as book reviews, including 7 high-impact and peer-reviewed journal articles in journals, including Religions, Noesis, and the Journal of the Oxford Graduate Theological Society. His latest peer-reviewed journal article, 'Via Digitalis: From the Postdigital to the Hyperdigital' is due to be published by Springer in the coming weeks. He has presented over 138 papers and talks at conferences around the world. In September 2019, he led the organization of the international and ecumenical 'New Trinitarian Ontologies' Conference at the University of Cambridge. And he has frequently been interviewed by the BBC, the Cambridge Festival, and for online podcasts. His research interests extend across a wide range of subject areas, centering on Trinitarian Ontology, Philosophy of Logic, Platonism, Patristics, and German Idealism. He has written an unpublished monograph 'Analogy and Dialectic: A Genealogy of the Trinity'. He is currently editing a forthcoming book 'New Trinitarian Ontologies', and hopes in the future to inaugurate a new field of research in the theology of logic as a contribution to the development of Christian and Trinitarian Ontology.

Professor Jacob Howland is Dean of UATX’s Intellectual Foundations program, which comprises the first two years of our undergraduate curriculum. Previously, Howland served as McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa and Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. He is the author of five books and one edited book, including two on Plato’s Republic as well as studies of Kierkegaard and the Talmud. Howland’s articles have appeared in The New Criterion, City Journal, and The Nation, among others.

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Professor Kevin Murphy was previously the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth School of Business and a Faculty Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He primarily studied the empirical analysis of inequality, unemployment, and relative wages, as well as the economics of growth and development and the economic value of improvements in health and longevity.

Murphy was the first professor at a business school to be chosen as a MacArthur Fellow and he was a John Bates Clark Medalist in 1997.

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Ilana Redstone is a sociology professor at the University of Illinois. She has a joint PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (2005) in Sociology and Demography. Redstone has been teaching and writing on topics related to critical thinking for years. In her co-authored book, Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education, published in Fall 2020 by Oxford University Press, she and her co-author examine the implications of the trend on campus to operate under a narrowly prescribed set of beliefs—beliefs that are particularly problematic precisely because they go unexamined. Redstone is also the author of "The Certainty Trap."

Professor David Ruth is Dean of UATX's Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Previously, Ruth held several leadership positions as a Permanent Military Professor of Mathematics at the United States Naval Academy, where he was an award-winning teacher from 2009 until 2022. Ruth has authored several articles in a variety of statistics journals, as well as a book chapter on mathematics in cybersecurity. Prior to his academic work, Ruth led and served as a naval officer with operational experience in submarine and surface warfare, nuclear power, oceanography, and meteorology.

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Professor Robert Topel was previously Co-Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago Booth School of Business and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has held visiting and research positions at a number of institutions, including the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the World Bank, the Economics Research Center of the National Opinion Research Center, and the Rand Corporation.

Topel and fellow Chicago Booth faculty member Kevin Murphy won the 2007 Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the best research paper in health economics. The award is given annually by the International Health Economics Association.

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Azadeh Vatanpour is a PhD candidate at Emory University. She holds an MA in Ancient Iranian Culture and Languages from Shiraz University, an MA in Folk Studies, and an MA in Religious Studies from Western Kentucky University. As a scholar of religion and minority studies, her research focuses on ethno-religious minority groups in the Middle East, particularly among the Yarsan community.

Vatanpour is currently working on Essays on Gurani Literature, Edited Volume with Dr. Alireza Korangy, delving into the extensive repertoire of literature written in the Gurani language by various ethno-religious groups residing in the Zagros region.

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