Henry P. “Hank” Sims is a professor of leadership and management at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. He has done research on leadership and teamwork and can speak about how relief organizations, including faith-based groups, respond to disasters.

Rabbi Stephen Pearce leads Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue and San Francisco’s largest Jewish congregation.

Michael Eric Dyson is Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (Basic Civitas Books, 2006).

National Disaster Interfaith Services, based in New York City, is a faith-based network provides training for clergy, religious leaders and faith-based groups, to help them plan for responding to disasters, and helps with recovery when a disaster does occur. Contact through executive director Peter Gudaitis.

David N. Myers is a history professor and director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies in Los Angeles. He is at work on a major history of the Jews of Los Angeles.

Rabbi Mendel Lifshitz and his wife, Esther, direct Chabad Jewish Center of Idaho in Boise. The center is part of Chabad Lubavitch, a New York community of Hasidim.

Havidán Rodríguez is former director of the Disaster Research Center and professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware in Newark.

Yechiel Shalom Goldberg teaches in the Jewish studies program at California State University, Long Beach, where he specializes in the study of Jewish mysticism.

Rabbi Daniel Fink leads Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel, a Reform congregation in Boise, Idaho. He is an expert on Jewish environmentalism.