Rudolph McKissick Jr. is co-senior pastor at the 9,000-member Bethel Baptist Institutional Church in Jacksonville, Fla. He is a national leader in contemporary sacred music and developed a professional-quality national recording choir at his church. He is an expert in sacred music and opera.

Catherine McLaughlin directed the Economic Research Initiative on the Uninsured at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The six-year-long initiative conducted research on health insurance coverage. McLaughlin is an expert on health care economics.

Mark Anthony Neal is associate professor of black popular culture in the Program in African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He wrote What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), and Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003).

Timothy McBride is a professor and associate dean for public health at George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. He focuses his research on Medicare reform, the uninsured and insurance markets, rural health and long-term care.

M. Cathleen Kaveny is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. She focuses on the relationship of law and morality.

Colleen Grogan is co-chair of the Center for Health Administration Studies at the University of Chicago. She is an expert on health policy and health politics.

H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. is a philosophy professor at Rice University in Houston and an expert on bioethics. His current research interests include rights and responsibilities in health care.

Nicole Ravenell Edwards is president and CEO for the Southern Institute on Children and Families, based in South Carolina but with affiliates throughout the South. The institute is a nonprofit organization that works with business leaders to try to improve children’s quality of life, including access to health care. Ravenell is a public policy expert.

Larry Churchill is a professor of medical ethics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and a professor at the graduate department of religion at the Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tenn. An expert on the justice and allocation of health care resources, he wrote Self-Interest and Universal Health Care: Why Well-Insured Americans Should Support Coverage for Everyone.