Center for Mind and Culture

The Center for Mind and Culture conducts research, training, and outreach in six focus areas: academy, health, history, policy, religion, and security. These areas all fall into what CMAC calls the mind-culture nexus, meaning that they are affected by both cultural circumstances and individuals’ realities. ³

Activities

The Center for Mind and Culture has created scholarly resources aimed to help researchers and educators understand their own values and practices, to reform academic practices and set policies more deliberately. CMAC’s viaSTEM system allows minority students to experience STEM education through simulation, in an effort to rectify perceived inequalities. CMAC’s Synthesizing Empirical Findings and Theory in the Scientific Study of Religion (SEFT) program supports the scientific study of religion (SSR) by allowing scientists and researchers to better collaborate. SEFT intends to make SSR more progressive, incremental, and productive by making research less redundant and more integrated. ³

The Center for Mind and Culture aims to understand the healing process and advance solutions to human health problems. CMAC’s Black Maternal Mortality Project aims to use its computational simulation methods and policy analysis to positively affect Black maternal mortality rates in the U.S. CMAC’s other health related projects, like Strategies Against Rural Suicide, Tools Against Child Trafficking, and Values in Viral Dispersion use computational models, artificial simulations, and visualizations, in order to provide insight to policy makers that would improve suicide prevention efforts and combat the child trafficking market, respectively. ³

The Center for Mind and Culture’s Extremist Violence Project aims to anticipate the sources of extremist violence through new methods, which include analyses of psychological, anthropological, social, and economic data along with statistical modeling, and computer simulation. CMAC aims to study and understand the complexities of radicalization, religious violence, and terrorism to achieve solutions to international security challenges. ³

Funding

The Center for Mind and Culture is funded by donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations. While CMAC does not disclose its donors, tax filings confirm donations from the Old Dominion University Research Foundation ($408,456 in 2019) ⁴ and the John Templeton Foundation ($234,697 in 2019). ⁵

Board of Directors

Wesley Wildman is the executive director and chair of the board of CMAC. Wildman is the director of the doctoral program in Religion and Science at Boston University. ⁶

Catherine Caldwell-Harris is the president of the board of CMAC and an associate professor of psychology at Boston University. ⁶

Saikou Diallo is a research assistant professor at the Virginia Modeling Analysis and Simulation Center at the Old Dominion University. ⁶

Neha Gondal is an assistant professor of Sociology and a fellow at the Hariri Institute of Computing and Computation Science at Boston University. ⁶

Patrick McNamara is a neuroscientist and the author of the essay collection Where God and Science Meet. ⁶