Our Team
James Ryerson
Ryerson has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of scholarship and journalism. Since 2003, he has been an editor at The New York Times, first at the Sunday Magazine and now at the Op-Ed page, specializing in editing pieces about the work of, or by, researchers and scholars. Ryerson is responsible for launching the Gray Matter column that appeared weekly in the Sunday Review section of the Times from December 2015 to January 2019, and which, as its name suggests, is designed to offer readers insight into some of the most intriguing questions about the human mind, the human body, and the world we inhabit. Ryerson was also the Ivory Tower columnist for The New York Times Book Review, covering university press books.
In 2018, he received the Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He is a permanent fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Before working at the Times, Ryerson was an editor at Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life; Legal Affairs: The Magazine of Yale Law School; and the science, culture, and technology magazine Feed.
Ryerson himself also has experience writing on academic topics: He has written introductions to Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, by David Foster Wallace (Columbia University Press) and Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty (Stanford University Press).
He has lectured on the “journalism of ideas” at Columbia University, New York University and Yale University. He holds a B.A. in History with highest honors and a B.A. in Philosophy, both from Brown University.
Christian B. Miller
Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was most recently the Director of the Honesty Project, funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In recent years he was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project, funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and the Director of the Character Project, funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 130 academic papers as well as Moral Psychology with Cambridge University Press (2021) and five books with Oxford University Press: Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021), and The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World (2026).
Dr. Miller was a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology, Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character, Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking, and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics.
Joseph Fridman is an editor, producer, and public-scholarship strategist who has led Beyond the Ivory Tower’s alumni community since 2018. He supports scholars in developing ideas, pitching editors, revising essays, working in podcasts and other media, and building relationships with writers and editors. He also produced and edited BTIT’s Line Edit video masterclass and interview podcast. The community now includes more than 200 alumni, who have published hundreds of op-eds, essays, and columns.
Joseph is on the editorial team at the Institute for Progress, where he works on Construction Physics, The Launch Sequence, and other projects, and is a Communications Editor for the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He also works with authors on ambitious nonfiction through book consulting, research, science advising, fact-checking, rewriting, and promotion. He co-founded Psychgeist with Dave Nussbaum and Isobel Heck.
Joseph previously led communications at Convergent Research, where he now serves as a strategic advisor, and spent nearly five years at Ginkgo Bioworks working across communications, editorial, investor relations, and governance. He holds a J.D. from CUNY School of Law, an M.S. in Media Advocacy from Northeastern University, and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from Cornell University.
His writing has appeared in Aeon, Elemental, and Templeton Ideas.
David is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association, for which he served as editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion. His work has been repeatedly funded by the National Science Foundation and has been regularly featured in the media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS Sunday Morning, NPR's Radiolab and On Point, and USA Today.
He is the author of How God Works, Emotional Success, The Truth About Trust, and co-author of The Wall Street Journal spotlight psychology bestseller Out of Character. He frequently writes about his work for major publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times.
David received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, is among the top one percent most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. She also holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior. She has published multiple op-eds in the New York Times.
In addition to the books Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain and How Emotions are Made, Dr. Barrett has published over 240 peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press. She has also given a popular TED talk with over 6 million views.
Dr. Barrett received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for her revolutionary research on emotion in the brain. These highly competitive, multimillion dollar awards are given to scientists of exceptional creativity who are expected to transform biomedical and behavioral research. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, the APS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2018, and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in Psychology in 2021.