William Grassie

William Grassie is the author of The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (Palgrave Macmillian, 2010) and a collection of essays Politics by Other Means: Science and Religion in the 21st Century (Metanexus, 2010). Grassie has also edited two volumes: Advanced Methodologies in the Scientific Study of Religion and Spirituality (Metanexus, 2010) and H+/- Transhumanism and Its Critics (Metanexus, 2010) with Gregory Hansell.

Grassie received his doctorate in religion from Temple University and his bachelor degree in political science and international relations from Middlebury College. He has taught in a variety of positions at Temple University, Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to graduate school, Grassie worked for ten years in international relations and conflict resolution in Washington, D.C, Jerusalem, Berlin and Philadelphia. He is the recipient of a number of academic awards and grants from the American Friends Service Committee, the Roothbert Fellowship and the John Templeton Foundation. In 2007-2008, Grassie served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Grassie is the founding executive director of the Metanexus Institute, which works to promote scientifically rigorous and philosophically open-ended explorations of foundational questions. Metanexus has worked with partners at some four hundred universities in 45 countries and publishes an online journal.

For more information, go to www.metanexus.net and www.grassie.net.