Fellows 2013

LCL FELLOWS 2013

Francis Wilson. An economist, and consummate inspirer of others, Francis is part of the team that leads a national initiative on strategies for dealing with poverty and inequality in South Africa. Education is another passion, with a particular concern about how one creates an environment that builds moral, visionary and deeply human persons. Founder of the Southern African Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU), first Director of the Data First Resource Unit at the University of Cape Town, a former UCT orator, Chairperson of Council at the University of Fort Hare from 1990-1999, and first Chairperson, 1996- 1999, of the National Water Advisory Council; from 2001 Chairperson of the International Social Science Council’s Scientific Committee of the International Comparative Research Program on Poverty. The 3rd. edition of his most recent book, Dinosaurs, Diamonds & Democracy: A Short Short History of South Africa, is due to be published in December 2015 in Afrikaans, English and Xhosa.

Mohamed Seedat. Head of the Institute for Social and Health Sciences, University of South Africa, and the SA Medical Research Council-UNISA Violence, Injury and Peace Research Unit, Mohamed has served on several editorial boards, international conference organising committees, acted as an external examiner/reviewer on masters and doctoral level research reports/thesis, books, funding proposals and journal manuscripts and provided advisory services to agencies in the injury prevention, community psychology and development fields. He has published in the areas of community psychology, racism, violence and community development, and acted as an advisor to several authorship development initiatives and research Unit applications for the Medical Research Council and National Research Foundation.

With an MD and MBA, Joyce is a retired Captain, US Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; retired Director, Center for Public Health Practice, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. A Board Certified Pathologist in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology, her current focus on interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral translation research leverages the evidence base to make progress toward system scale change for health and equity. She provides leadership coaching for cross-sectoral teams nationally for the Public Health Institute’s National Leadership Academy for the Public’s Health. She served on the 2014 ProjectAdvisory Committee of the Institute for Alternative Futures publication, Public Health Scenario 2030: A Scenario Exploration; and the Institute of Medicine Committees on the Assessment of Resiliency and Prevention Programs for Mental and Behavioral Health in Service Members and Their Families (2013-2014); and the Committee on Public Health Strategies (2009-2012). She serves on the boards of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Healthcare Plan of Georgia, Inc. and AMGP Georgia Managed Care Company, Inc.

Larry Pray. Larry is co-author with Gary Gunderson of The Leading Causes of Life, the book that launched the ideas that lie at the core of this Initiative. More recently he authored a book richly mixed with his own reflections and paintings on Thresholds: Connecting Body and Soul after Brain Injury (Ruder Finn Press). Before that he published Journey of a Diabetic with Simon and Schuster. His interests lie in creativity and healing, chronic disease, and … finding life in unlikely places! Larry, par excellence a pastor, writer, poet and painter, graduated from Union Theological Seminary (MDiv), having received an MA at Johns Hopkins University, and a BA at Beloit College. Larry’s deeply insightful and powerfully evocative poems and paintings following a series of strokes, and created for as many Fellows as he was able, are a central, vital element of our self-understanding.

Paul Laurentii.
Professor, Wake Forest School of Medicine, and President and Founder of Starling Insights LLC, as director of the Laboratory for Complex Brain Networks (LCBN), Paul leads a team pioneering the use of complexity theory and network science to understanding the brain as a complex, integrated network. His company also applies these methods and concepts from the brain to real-world issues, recognizing that we are drowning in data and must change the way we view the world if we want to understand our complex times. This includes work to understand and identify unintended consequences of decisions in organizations. Paul is an avid and amazing grower of orchids!

Anna Tharyan. Professor and consultant in general adult Psychiatry, with an interest in psychosocial rehabilitation, Anna works on ways of extending the reach of the clinical services of the tertiary care referral center in which she has worked all her life. How to make mental health care affordable and accessible to those who are economically deprived is her vital concern. Anna has taught Psychiatry to postgraduate students of Psychiatry, medical undergraduates, nursing and occupational therapy students, but of greater interest to her is the opportunity to teach basic Psychiatry to community volunteers and other non-professional workers – requiring familiarization with local culture and innovation in economically challenged communities, redefining what, in the context of health, is assumed to be standard wisdom and science.

Douglas McGaughey. Emeritus Professor in Religious Studies, Willamette University, OR. He completed his doctorate under Paul Ricoeur at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He is the author of a trilogy of books in Philosophical, Systematic, and Practical Theology as well as the editor of a Festschrift in honor of Herman Waetjen at the San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, CA. His translation of Otfried Höffe’s Can Virtue Make Us Happy? The Art of Living and Morality was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. A Fulbright Senior Fellow during 1992-1993 in Tübingen, in 2006 he was among the prize winners of an essay contest sponsored by Das Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover, Germany on the question ‘Braucht Werterziehung Religion?’, published by the Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen in 2007. In 2010, he participated in a conference under Otfried Höffe on Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason, his paper subsequently being published in Immanuel Kant: Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Berlin: Akadamie Verlag, 2010). He is a Corresponding Member of the Research Center for Political Philosophy (Korrespondierendes Mitglied der Forschungsstelle Politische Philosophie) at the Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen. He is host of the website http://www.criticalidealism.org.

Kenneth I Pargament. Professor, Department of Psychology, Bowling Green State University, and Adjunct Professor, Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine. Ken specializes in community psychology and the psychology of religion and spirituality. Mentoring over 35 Ph. D. graduate students, he has been a consultant with NIH, WHO, Templeton Foundation, and Fetzer Institute. Editor-in-chief of the APA Handbook of Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality, among his many publications is the recent Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy: Understanding and Addressing the Sacred. Ken went into psychology because he was ‘interested in the big questions: Why are we here? How should we live our lives? How can we make the world a better place?’

Euginia Eng. Professor of Health Behaviour, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Geni focuses on the relevance and measurement of the concept of community competence as an outcome of community-based interventions. She has done extensive fieldwork in rural villages of Togo, Indonesia, and African American communities in the Mississippi Delta and North Carolina. She also works on the lay health advisor (LHA) intervention model, based on the concept of natural helping across social networks in ethnic minority populations, and on applying the Action-Oriented Community Diagnosis. Previously Director of the Kellogg Health Scholars Program in community-based participatory research (CBPR), Geni also enjoys piano, jazz and all things West African.

Scoggin, Steve. Steve is Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, ordained. President of Carenet (linked to Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center), a state-wide network of 35 plus outpatient behavioral health clinics—as leaders in spiritually integrated psychotherapy, counseling, education and research, the largest network of its kind in the world—Steve is deeply involved at state, local and non-profit levels in advocacy, education, and service provision for children, adults and families who live with physical, emotional, and neurological disabilities. Living at the intersection of mind, body, spirit and community, he seeks to root new models of spiritually integrated behavioral health into medical and non-profit contexts, for the sake of all.

Douglas Easterling. Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Health Policy at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Doug served as department chair from 2005-2015. Prior to coming to Wake Forest, he was a division director within the Center for Youth, Family and Community Partnerships at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. At both Wake Forest and UNCG, Doug has worked as an evaluator, strategic advisor and facilitator for national, state, and local foundations, as well as a variety of non-profit organizations and government agencies. He also served as the Director of Research and Evaluation at The Colorado Trust, a health foundation in Denver. Doug has written and presented extensively on the topics of program evaluation, strategic philanthropy, social capital, community capacity, collaboration, civic leadership and systems change. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Management from the Wharton School, an M.A. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of North Carolina, and a B.A. from Carleton College. Doug loves writing, dog training, exploring indigenous spirituality and healing, and travel—to mountains and desert! Above all, he seeks to be part of processes, experiences and communities where people grow, evolve and step into their power.

Jill Olivier. With a PhD from the University of Cape Town, Jill is the Research Director of the International Health Assets Programme based in the School of Public Health & Family Medicine, UCT, conducting research in South Africa, Lesotho, Zambia, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, the DRC, the USA and the Asia-Pacific region. Her particular interests are in health systems research, interdisciplinary research and theory, collaboration and partnership studies, communication theory, cultural hermeneutics, HIV/AIDS and society, complexity studies, health promotion, monitoring and evaluation, leadership and institutional development, community-driven development and participatory inquiry, health literacy and translational sciences, and African Studies. She has a previous life in the publishing industry, as a researcher with several other projects and at the World Bank.

Sharon Engebretson. Trained in Clinical Pastoral Education, Sharon is Associate Vice President in the Division of Faith & Health Ministries at Wake Forest Baptist Health. She administers the division’s operational and strategic ministry initiatives, serves on the Medical Center’s Council for Inclusion and Diversity, and is also Adjunct Faculty at Wake Forest Divinity School. An ordained Methodist (Chicago/Illinois), she has held Board positions for the Association of Clinical Pastoral Educators, chairing several of the ACPE committees along the way and is also on the Advisory Board, Community Partnership for End of Life Care. Sharon has been key to supporting the LCL Initiative out of Wake Forest. When not carrying out all her formal duties, or immersing herself in a variety of literatures, she is also a lover of horses and the great outdoors.