2012 Walter Thorson

November 7 | "'Fourth Day' Things: Naturalism and the Physical Sciences"

Marv Wilson has taught Old Testament and Jewish-Christian studies at Gordon since 1971. Dr. Wilson's widely used textbook, Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Korean and other languages. For a number of years, Marv worked as a translator and editor of the New International Version of the Bible. Recently, he contributed a major article to the ESV Study Bible. Marv is married to Polly, a Gordon graduate and an accomplished pianist.

November 7 | "Intelligent Design: Contemporary Culture and Evangelical Sub-Culture"

Greg Carmer has been serving at Gordon College since 1998. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in theology from Boston College. He lives in Beverly with his wife Laura and their three sons.

November 8 | "Biological Complexity and Biological Function" 

Randy Isaac is a solid-state physics research scientist and executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), where he has been a member since 1976 and a fellow since 1996. Isaac received his bachelor's degree from Wheaton College in Illinois and his doctorate in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined IBM to work at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1977 and most recently served as the vice=president of systems technology and science for the company.

November 7 | "'First Day' Things: Naturalism and the Physical Sciences"

Craig Story received a B.S. from Gordon College, a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Brandeis University and did his Post-Doc at MIT and Harvard Medical School under Hidde L. Ploegh. Story's research interests have focused on molecular immunology. His graduate and post-doctoral work involved work on the mechanism of antibody transport across the human placenta, and the ways viruses trick the immune system to escape detection. He also worked in the biotechnology industry in the area of drug delivery using the body's own antibody transport system. Most recently, his research has focused on generating antibodies for diagnostic tools that can be used by the world's poor.  Since his 2006 sabbatical, Dr. Story has been exploring the use of new micro-scale tools to greatly speed up the process of antibody discovery. He continues this research, collaborating with the laboratory of JC Love at MIT's new Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

November 7 | "Contemporary Culture and Evangelical Sub-Culture"

Karl Giberson is an internationally known science-and-religion scholar, speaker, and writer. He has lectured at the Vatican, Oxford University, London’s Thomas Moore Institute, the Ettore Majorana center in Sicily, the Venice Institute of Arts and Letters, the University of Navarre in Spain and at many American venues, including MIT, Brigham Young, Xavier, Stonehill, Wheaton, Gordon, the Harvard Club of New York and others. He has published more than 150 articles, reviews, and essays, both technical and popular, in outlets that include USA Today, LA Times, Salon.com, Discover, Weekly Standard, Quarterly Review of Biology, Perspectives on Science & Faith, The Edge.org, and Books & Culture. He has written or co-authored seven books, and contributed to many edited volumes.

November 8 | "Biological Complexity and Biological Function"

David C. Lahti is an Assistant Professor of Biology and the Undergraduate Research Coordinator at Queens College, City University of New York, where he runs a Behavior and Evolution laboratory focusing   mainly on learned behavior in birds and humans.

Professor Lahti received a B.S. in biology and history from Gordon College. He received a Ph.D. in moral philosophy and the philosophy of biology at the Whitefield Institute, Oxford, for a study of the contributions science can and cannot make to an understanding of the foundations of morality.  He then  received a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan for a study of rapid evolution in an introduced bird.

He has been a Darwin Fellow at the University of Massachusetts and a Kirschstein NRSA Research Fellow with the U.S. National Institute of Health, where he studied the development and evolution of bird song. His current research projects involve co-evolution between avian brood parasites and their hosts in Africa, the genetic and cultural divergence of the house finch, the diversification of moral beliefs among African peoples, and the evolution of our capacity for morality and religion.