Ferrari is Professor at the Law Faculty of the Universita degli Studi di Milano and president of the International Consortium for Law and Religious Studies. He is one of the experts on the legal status of Islam in Europe. He is a frequent contributor to journals, workshops and conferences dealing with these and other legal issues, spanning the civil and canon law traditions. His many publications include: Islam and European Legal Systems (edited with A. Bradney, Aldershot, 2000), Musulmani in Italia (Bologna, 1996), Law and Religion in post-Communist Europe (Leuven, 2003).

Fischer holds the Horowitz Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. He was awarded his Ph.D. degree in June 2007 from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology in Hebrew University in Jerusalem. As a fellow of the Van Leer Institute and of the Shalom Hartman Institute, he has given university talks and published numerous articles in Israeli and European journals on the topics of Jewish history, Israeli society, secularization, Zionism, and religion and tolerance and inter religious dialogue from within the monotheistic traditions. His edited book (together with Adam Seligman), The Burden of Tolerance: Religious Traditions and the Challenge of Pluralism was published (in Hebrew)by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and by HaKibbutz HaMeuchad in 2007. Fischer has worked in the field of education for the past 25 years. In the past 10 years he has worked in the field of religion, democracy and tolerance. From 1996-2007 he has been the founder and executive director of Yesodot—Center for Torah and Democracy which works to advance education for democracy in the State Religious school sector. 

Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University and Research Associate at the Institute for Culture, Religion and World Affairs there. He has lived and taught at universities in the United States, in Israel and in Hungary where he was a Fulbright Fellow from 1990-1992. He lived close to twenty years in Israel where he was a member of Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in the early 1970s. His books include The Idea of Civil Society (Free Press, 1992), Inner-worldly Individualism (Transaction Press, 1994), The Problem of Trust (Princeton University Press, 1997), Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self and Transcendence (Princeton University Press, 2000) with Mark Lichbach Market and Community (Penn State University Press, 2000), Modest Claims: Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition (Notre Dame University Press, 2004) and with Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford University Press, 2008). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Sumka is an expert in post-conflict reconstruction and development in fragile and conflict-ridden regions. He recently completed a 25 year career with the U.S. Agency for International Development. For more than 17 of those years, he lived and worked in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East, including as the Director of USAID’s country missions in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and, most recently, West Bank-Gaza. He provided strategic leadership for programs in complex multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies that fostered economic, social, and political development and delivered humanitarian assistance. Sumka attained the rank of Minister Counselor in the Senior Foreign Service. In the West Bank and Gaza, he worked intimately with the U.S. efforts to stimulate and advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by helping to build the institutions of a Palestinian state. During his four-year tenure, USAID directed more than $1.6 billion dollars toward this effort. Based in Sarajevo from 2002 to 2006, Sumka led USAID’s programs to help rebuild Bosnia- Herzegovina’s multi ethnic society. As the USAID director in Albania from 1999-2002, he rebuilt the Mission and its programs following two security-related evacuations. He managed the Mission’s assistance to the Kosovo refugees in 1999 and led an extensive array of development programs for Albania following that crisis. Sumka’s technical areas include low-cost shelter and urban development as well as governance and rule of law. Before joining USAID, he managed inner-city policy and research programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He holds a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina and has degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology and Northwestern University.

Winship is Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He did his undergraduate work in sociology and mathematics at Dartmouth College and his graduate work at Harvard University, receiving his degree in 1977. After leaving Harvard he did a one year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin and a two-year fellowship at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. In 1980 he joined the Sociology Department at Northwestern University. During his twelve years at Northwestern he was Director of the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and for four years chair of the Department of Sociology. He was a founding member of Northwestern's Department of Statistics, and held a courtesy appointment in Economics. From 1984 to 1986 he was Director of the Economics Research Center at NORC. He has been a member of the Harvard department since 1992. He is currently doing research on several topics: The Ten Point Coalition, a group of black ministers who are working with the Boston police to reduce youth violence; statistical models for causal analysis; the effects of education on mental ability; causes of the racial difference in performance in elite colleges and universities; changes in the racial differential in imprisonment rates over the past sixty years.