Bill Doherty is a co-founder of Braver Angels and the creator of the Braver Angels workshop approach. Bill is a Professor and Director of the Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota.  Bill combines a background in family therapy and community engagement. His areas of research include democratic community building with families, citizen health care, marriage, fatherhood, families dealing with chronic illness, and marriage and couples therapy.

Scott Althaus is Merriam Professor of Political Science, Professor of Communication, and Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He also has faculty appointments with the School of Information Sciences and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His work with the Cline Center applies text analytics methods and Artificial Intelligence algorithms to extract insights from millions of news stories in ways that produce new forms of knowledge that advance societal well-being around the world. His own research interests explore the communication processes that support political accountability in democratic societies and that empower political discontent in non-democratic societies. His interests focus on four areas of inquiry: (1) how journalists construct news coverage about public affairs, (2) how leaders attempt to shape news coverage for political advantage, (3) how citizens use news coverage for making sense of public affairs, and (4) how the opinions of citizens are communicated back to leaders. He has particular interests in popular support for war, data science methods for extreme-scale analysis of news coverage, cross-national comparative research on political communication, the psychology of information processing, and communication concepts in democratic theory. His current projects include using data mining methods to help journalists cover terrorist attacks in responsible ways and a book manuscript to be published by Cambridge University Press about the dynamics of popular support for war in the United States.

Colleen Murphy is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law, Professor of Philosophy and of Political Science, and Director of the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program in the Illinois Global Institute.  Her research for the past twenty years has focused on the ethical dimensions of pursuing political reconciliation and transitional justice in deeply divided political communities. She is the author of The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which received the North American Society for Social Philosophy Book Award; A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and more than 70 journal articles and book chapters.  Prof Murphy has delivered more than 150 invited lectures on political reconciliation and transitional justice throughout the United States and in 12 additional countries worldwide, including before the Carlisle, PA Truth and Reconciliation Commission as it finalizes its recommendations and the Colombian Constitutional Court amidst the implementation of the Final Accord to end more than fifty years of armed conflict. In addition, she has written or recorded more than a dozen popular op-eds and podcasts about her research on political reconciliation and transitional justice for venues including the Boston Review, Chicago Tribune, The Conversation, and Ms. Magazine. Murphy holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame.

Ken E. Salo is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His current teaching and community engaged research focuses on how past and present social movements of urban poor inhabitants of Cape Town, Champaign and Chicago collaborate to build transnational connections, collectively imagine and create future antiracist communities.