About The Team
Project Leader
Dr. Christian Miller is the Zachary T. Smith Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His main areas of research are meta-ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and philosophy of religion, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Psychology, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The Journal of Ethics, Social Theory and Practice, The Journal of Philosophical Research, The European Journal of Philosophy, and Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. He is the editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press) and the book review editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy, and is currently editing The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press). He was awarded both the 2009 Wake Forest University Reid-Doyle Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the 2009 Wake Forest University Award for Excellence in Research, which is the first time that a faculty member at Wake Forest has ever won both prizes in the same year. He has completed a book manuscript entitled Moral Character: Philosophy and Psychology, which articulates a new framework for thinking about character that is both conceptually coherent and empirically supported by research in social psychology.
Psychology Co-Director
Dr. William Fleeson is the Kirby Faculty Fellow and Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, serves as consulting editor for several leading journals, and has been PI on two separate NIH R01s. His work focuses on examining actual behavior, behavior patterns, and behavior contingencies in order to obtain new insights about personality constructs and to explain the mechanisms and operation of personality constructs. His work on this line of research has resulted in several publications in leading journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Personality, and Journal of Research in Personality, and in the 2002 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Theoretical Innovation Prize.
Psychology Co-Director
Dr. R. Michael Furr is the McCulloch Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Psychology at Wake Forest University. In addition, he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Research in Personality, he currently serves on editorial boards for Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Journal of Personality Assessment, and Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, and he is former Executive Editor of the Journal of Social Psychology. His broad areas of expertise are personality psychology, social psychology, psychological measurement, and quantitative analysis. More specifically, his substantive research includes person-situation interactions, peoples' perceptions of their social worlds, and personality pathology, while his methodological interests include psychometrics, statistical analysis of data from repeated-measures research designs, and the statistical analysis of profile similarity. He recently co-authored a book, Psychometrics: An Introduction (Sage Publications), and his research has appeared in journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Personality, Journal of Research in Personality, European Journal of Personality, Social Psychological and Personality Science, and Psychological Methods.
Theology Director
Dr. Angela Knobel is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. Her main areas of research are Thomas Aquinas's virtue theory, ethics, and bioethics. Her papers have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Thomist, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Nova et Vetera, International Philosophical Quarterly, Christian Bioethics, Studies in Christian Ethics, and Théologie Morale Fondamentale, and her book, Aquinas and the Infused Moral Virtues, is under contract with University of Notre Dame Press.
Post-doctoral Fellow
Dr. Eranda Jayawickreme received his Ph.D. in positive and political psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in October 2010. He was an advisee of Martin E.P. Seligman, who has played a formative role in the development of the emerging field of positive psychology. Eranda continues to be affiliated with the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania as a Visiting Scholar, and is broadly interested in questions related to positive psychology, moral psychology, political psychology and the study of ethnopolitical warfare. His interest in the scientific study of character has its origins in his undergraduate research, which explored moral behavior from the perspective of ecological psychology. His other research interests includes well-being and post-traumatic growth among war-affected populations in Rwanda and Sri Lanka, the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of positive psychology, and the effect of monetary incentives on judgments of moral offenses. Trained in both psychology and moral philosophy, he graduated with summa cum laude honors from Franklin & Marshall College in 2005, and was awarded the Henry S. Williamson Medal, the college's highest student award presented annually to the outstanding senior of the graduating class. His awards include grants from the Asia Foundation/USAID, the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism, and the Positive Psychology Center, a Mellon Refugee Initiative Fund Fellowship, and numerous academic awards from Franklin & Marshall College.
Psychology Graduate Students
Ashley Hawkins is currently a first year graduate student in the psychology department at Wake Forest University. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in psychology from the Honors College at the College of Charleston in 2007. Through the College of Charleston and the Medical University of South Carolina she has contributed to various research endeavors concerning the theory of planned behavior, stress and health behaviors, and drug-related addictive behaviors. She spent a semester in 2005 on Semester at Sea where she was inspired by different cultures to examine the similarities and differences of personality and perceptions of experience. Currently, she is assessing self-other agreement on morally relevant personality traits, moral concern, and general moral character.
Alicia Jenkins graduated from the Barrett Honors college at Arizona State University in 2010 and is a first year graduate student in the psychology department at Wake Forest University. She has been involved with research on moral and rule violations and psychology and the law in the LSPRG and CARMA labs at ASU. Her research interests lie in the disconnect between what people believe about right and wrong and their everyday behaviors.
Business Manager
Dr. Joshua Seachris received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Oklahoma in December 2010. His primary areas of research are in philosophy of religion, the meaning of life, and ethics. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Asian Philosophy, Philo, and Religious Studies. He currently has a contract with Blackwell for an anthology titled Exploring the Meaning of Life: An Anthology and Guide. From May 2009 to August 2010, he was Program Administrator for the Templeton Research Fellows Program at Oxford University.
Program Coordinator
Kathleen McKee has a combination of experience and education in the fields of psychology, human resources, and higher education administration. She received her Master's Degree in Human Resource Management from the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina and her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Francis Marion University.