Many hands make light work, as the saying goes, and so NCSE is pleased to announce the addition of three new members of its staff.
NCSE possesses a unique trove of material on the creationism/evolution controversy, and we regard it as part of our mission to preserve it for posterity -- as well as for occasions such as Kitzmiller v. Dover, where NCSE's archives helped to establish the creationist antecedents of the "intelligent design" movement. Replacing Jessica Moran as the Archives Project Director is Charles Hargrove, who comes to NCSE after stints at the Bancroft Library, the Japanese American National Library, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives. He earned his master's degree in library and information sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, where he also earned a master's degree in archaeology. He is hard at work cataloging, organizing, and expanding NCSE's copious collection of books, periodicals, articles, correspondence, and ephemera relating to the creationism/evolution controversy. If you have any materials that you would like to donate to NCSE's archives, or if you would like to use the collections, feel free to contact him.
Louise S. Mead is NCSE's new Education Project Director. We have long wanted to have a staff member to concentrate on outreach to the educational community, and Mead fits the bill excellently. After teaching science at the high school level in Connecticut, Mead earned her Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include understanding the evolutionary processes that create and maintain biological diversity, specifically, how sexual selection shapes patterns of evolutionary change and influences the evolution of sexual isolation and speciation. After post-doctoral fellowships at Oregon State University and the University of California, Davis, and papers in journals such as Evolution, Ethology, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution, she joined NCSE, where she will be developing materials pertaining to evolution education, representing NCSE to the education community, speaking to the press about issues involving evolution education and challenges to it, and counseling teachers and others facing challenges to evolution education.
Finally, Peter M. J. Hess is NCSE's new Faith Project Director, replacing Phina Borgeson, who occupied the same post on a part-time basis. Hess comes to NCSE from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, where he administered a number of science/religion programs as well as authoring a number of scholarly papers; his book Catholicism and the Sciences in the Modern World, 1400-2000, co-authored with Paul Allen, is to be published by Greenwood Press in 2007. He earned his PhD at the Graduate Union Theology Seminary in 1993, with a dissertation on Nature and the Existence of God in English Natural Theology from Hooker to Paley, 1596-1802, taught at a number of colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, and is a member of the International Society for Science and Religion. At NCSE, he will be in charge of developing outreach programs to and educational resources for the faith community, with the goal of fostering a constructive engagement with evolution.
Welcome to all three.