Instructors

 Barry Kosmin, PhD, is a sociologist and research professor in public policy and law at Trinity College. He has been a sociology professor at CUNY Graduate School and was the principal investigator of the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey. Kosmin is the author of more than 50 scholarly articles and over twenty books and research monographs including One Nation Under God (coauthored) and Religion in a Free Market.
Phil Zuckerman, PhD, is currently an associate professor of sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he teaches courses in religion, secularity, and social theory. He is the author of several books, including Society Without God (NYU, 2008) and Invitation to the Sociology of Religion (Routledge, 2003), and the editor of several books, including Atheism and Secularity (Praeger, 2009) and The Social Theory of W.E.B. Du Bois (Pine Forge, 2004). He has also written numerous essays and articles, and is a regular contributor to Free Inquiry and Huffington Post.
Luke Galen, PhD, is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at Grand Valley State University. His main area of research and teaching focuses on the psychology of religion. He has three current areas of research. The first involves the social cognition of religious fundamentalism. He is also currently studying religion and the Just World Belief. Finally, he studies non religious groups and the process of apostasy. He teaches classes on: the Psychology of Religion, Controversial Issues in Psychology, and Human Sexuality. He is faculty advisor to the GVSU Center for Inquiry on- campus group and is a member of the Reasonable Doubts podcast and radio show.
Ronald Lindsay, JD/PhD, is the President and CEO at the Center for Inquiry/Transnational. He authored the amicus curiae brief that was submitted on behalf of the Council for Secular Humanism and the International Academy of Humanism in McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky. He has had articles published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, and The American Journal of Bioethics.
Barry Lynn, Rev. Since 1992, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn has served as executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington, D.C. based organization dedicated to the preservation of the Constitution’s religious liberty provisions (www.au.org). Lynn’s most recent book is Piety & Politics: The Right Wing Assault on Religious Freedom (Random House, 2007) and he is the co-author of First Freedom First: A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting Religious Liberty and the Separation of Church and State.(Beacon Press, 2008). He has authored several law review and professional articles on free speech, school vouchers, and President Bush’s “faith based initiative”.
Dan Barker is a former PR Director of the Freedom From Religion Foundation from 1987 to 2004. He was elected co-president of the Foundation with Annie Laurie Gaylor in 2004. He is a contributing editor of Freethought Today and is involved with the Foundation's state/church lawsuits.
Eddie Tabash JD, is a practicing lawyer and a political and social activist. Tabash has debated several Christian apologists, including Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, and Greg Bahnsen. He is also the Chair of the First Amendment Task Force for the Council for Humanism.
Derek Araujo is Vice President and General Counsel of the Center for Inquiry and the director of CFI's legal department. He graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in physics, and earned a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, where he served as a Senior Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. During his college years, he was the founding President of the Campus Freethought Alliance (now CFI On Campus) and of the Harvard Secular Society.
Paul Kurtz, PhD, is Editor-in-Chief of Free Inquiry, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Chairman of the Center for Inquiry/Transnational. For forty years, Kurtz has remained the leading organizational and intellectual figure in the humanist and skeptical movement. 
Tom Flynn,  is the Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism and Vice President for Media at the Center for Inquiry. He is also the Editor of Free Inquiry, the founding Coeditor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin, and the Director of the Robert G. Ingersoll Birthplace Museum.
John Shook, PhD, is Vice President for Research and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry/Transnational. Among his current responsibilities are the Center for Inquiry's Naturalism Research Project and the expansion of the Center's Jo Ann Boydston Library of American Philosophical Naturalism.
Joe Nickell, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry/Transnational, a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and an investigative columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician and now a prominent skeptical investigator of the paranormal, Nickell has become renowned for his investigations of legends, mysteries, frauds, fakes, and shams, and he has published many books recounting his investigations around the world.