Meet the Team
Patrick McNamara, PhD
Principal Investigator
Patrick McNamara is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northcentral University. He also holds appointments in the departments of Neurology at the University of Minnesota and Boston University School of Medicine. He is a founding editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior, the flagship journal for the emerging field of neuroscience of religion. He is a co-founder (along with Professor Wesley Wildman) of the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of the neurologic and evolutionary correlates of religious beliefs, behaviors, and practices. Until 2018, he was based for 20 years at the Boston University School of Medicine.
He is the editor of Where God and Science Meet and Science and World Religions, and the author of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Religion, Neuroscience and the Self: A New Personalism (Routledge, 2020), and numerous publications on the neurology and psychology of religion. He is a past recipient of a John Templeton Foundation award on the “Neurology of religious cognition.” A largely expanded second edition of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press) is due out summer of 2022.
In his 25 years of research in the biomedical sciences, he has had extensive experience overseeing and leading large complex scientific and biomedical projects. He was project leader for 3 separate NIH grants in the last 10 years. He has also been a merit Review Award Recipient in the VA Medical System.
John Balch, Doctoral Candidate
Postdoctoral Researcher
John Balch utilizes tools drawn from computational social science and the cognitive sciences to analyze the evolution of religious ideologies over time, particularly as individuals respond to the challenges posed by climate change. He is a Doctoral Candidate in Religion at Boston University and a Lindamood Fellow at the Center for Mind and Culture in Boston, Massachusetts. John is currently working with Dr. Patrick McNamara on the John Templeton Foundation Project on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition. This project is the first of its kind to fund a large stream of focused neuroscientific research on religion coordinated across multiple labs. This project will be investigating the relationship between dreaming and religious cognition using cutting-edge EEG technology that enables data collection in a naturalistic setting.
Chanel Reed, MA
Project Coordinator
Chanel Reed holds a Master of Arts in Psychology from Northern Arizona University. During her time in that program she was selected from a candidate pool to be the Advanced Neuroscience Lab Instructor due to her aptitude and passion for that area of the field. In that position she taught the Advanced Neuroscience students, created exams, and led sheep brain dissections for the purpose of teaching brain anatomy. Chanel taught two courses at Coconino Community College in Northern Arizona — Introduction to Psychology and Biological Psychology. After teaching, Chanel gained four years of administration experience as a Medical Office Manager before returning to higher education as an Academic and Finance Advisor at Northcentral University. Chanel spent two years in a leadership role for NCU Advising and in 2022 was selected to serve as the Research Project Coordinator for the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition at NCU. She is thrilled to be involved in such fascinating and important work.
Rachel Raider, BA
Data Steward
Rachel Raider earned her BA from The Evergreen State College where she had the unique opportunity to study lucid dream research, originally focused on cognitive induction techniques. Exploration into mindfulness inspired her to design a method for managing symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, primarily nightmares, with a combination of lucid dreaming and mind/body awareness training. For her research capstone project, she created and conducted a lucid dream induction study online. Since graduating, Rachel has been collaborating on various dream research projects and attending the annual International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) conferences, where she serves on the Board of Directors. Recently, Rachel replicated her lucid dream induction study at the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory with a grant from the DreamScience Foundation. She is very excited to be contributing to the Cognitive Neuroscience of Religious Cognition project.
