Emilie Kao is director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation. She specializes in legal conflicts related to religious freedom.

Leslie Cooper serves as deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project. Over the last two decades, she’s worked on many cases related to the rights of LGBT adoptive parents.

Melissa D. Carter is executive director of the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University School of Law. 

Ying Chen is a research scientist with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. She was the lead author of a 2018 study about the relationship between religious and spiritual practices in childhood and adult health outcomes.

Christel J. Manning is a religious studies professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. She is the author of Losing Our Religion: How Unaffiliated Parents Are Raising Their Children.

Ara Norenzayan is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He authored a 2014 study asking whether religion makes people moral.

Lisa D. Pearce is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She studies religious and family dynamics and how they affect a child’s transition to adulthood.

Bilge Selcuk is an associate professor of psychology at Koc University in Turkey. She co-authored a 2015 study showing that religious children are less altruistic than other children.

Amin Aaser is the founder and managing director of Noor Kids, an organization that creates and sends books on Islam to Muslim children each month.