Trust in the University

Laurie L. Patton is President of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. From 2015 to 2025, Patton served as the first woman president of Middlebury College. Her presidency included a major programmatic initiative in conflict transformation touching all parts of the campus. She also served as dean of Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and Durden Professor of Religion, and as Candler Professor of Religion and Inaugural Director of the Center for Faculty Development at Emory University. Patton began her career at Bard College.

Patton is an authority on South Asian history, culture, and religion, and, more recently, theories of conflict and interreligious engagement in the public square. She is the author or editor of 12 scholarly books and 70 articles in these areas. Patton has also authored three books of poems and has translated the classical Sanskrit text, “The Bhagavad Gita,” for Penguin Classics.

Patton earned her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2019. She holds honorary degrees from Rutgers University and Hebrew Union College and has been honored with Duke University’s Samuel Dubois Cooke Award in Community and Civic Life as well as the Concordia Leadership Council Award in Leadership and Civic Life.

Jeremy C. Young is the Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). He is also the co-director of AAC&U’s Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education initiative and the lead author of AAC&U’s report “The Trust Agenda: A Framework for Advancing Public Trust in Higher Education,” published in June 2026.

A national leader on issues of academic freedom and university autonomy, Young previously served as director of state and higher education policy and led the Freedom to Learn program at PEN America. He has also worked at the American Historical Association. Young was an assistant professor of history and director of the Institute of Politics and Public Affairs at Utah Tech University, and he has taught at Grand Valley State University, Indiana University, and Indiana State University. He currently serves on the board of the Partnership to Advance Transformation in Higher Ed.

Young holds a B.A. in History and Music from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and an M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. History from Indiana University. He is the author of “The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940” (Cambridge, 2017) and the co-author of three “America’s Censored Classrooms” reports at PEN America.

Praveen Sethupathy is Professor of Physiological Genomics and Chair of the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences, where he leads a research lab focused on genomic approaches to understand physiology and human disease. He received his B.A. degree from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Genomics from the University of Pennsylvania.

After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Human Genome Research Institute under the mentorship of NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, Sethupathy moved in 2011 to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics. That same year he was selected by Genome Technology as one of the nation’s top 25 rising young investigators in genomics. In 2017, Sethupathy returned to Cornell University as an associate professor.

Sethupathy has authored more than 165 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals such as PNAS, Cell, and Science, and has served as a reviewer for over 50 different journals. Honors include a faculty merit award for outstanding teaching and mentoring, the prestigious American Diabetes Association Pathway To Stop Diabetes Research Accelerator (awarded to only three people per year), and the inaugural Boehringer Ingelheim Award for Excellence in Summer Research Mentorship. Sethupathy is also dedicated to improving science communication and has served on the advisory board for the AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion.

Priyamvada Natarajan is the inaugural Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor in Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, with a secondary appointment in Physics. A member of the Yale faculty since 2000, Natarajan currently serves as Chair of the Department of Astronomy and, since 2022, as an external principal investigator at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative. She is noted for her work probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy, using gravitational lensing, and developing models that describe the assembly and growth histories of black holes in the universe. Natarajan is also the author of the critically acclaimed book “Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos” (2016).

Natarajan’s research work and original contributions to astrophysics have been recognized with many awards and honors, including the Emeline Conland Bigelow Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the India Abroad Foundation’s “Face of the Future” Award, an India Empire NRI award for Achievement in the Sciences, and the award for academic achievement from the Global Organization for the People of Indian Origin. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, the American Physical Society, the Explorers Club, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

In addition to her faculty position at Yale, Natarajan holds the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Professorship at the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and an honorary professorship for life at the University of Delhi, India. She is an Affiliate at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University and an associate member of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York.

Holden Thorp has been Editor-in-Chief of the Science family of journals since 2019. He came to Science from Washington University, where he was provost from 2013 to 2019 and professor from 2013 to 2023. Thorp is currently a professor at George Washington University and on leave to serve as the Editor-in-Chief at Science. He joined Washington University after spending three decades at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he served as the 10th chancellor from 2008 through 2013.

Thorp earned a Bachelor of Science degree from UNC and a Doctorate in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology, and he completed postdoctoral work at Yale University. He holds honorary degrees from Hofstra University and North Carolina Wesleyan College and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Thorp co-founded Viamet Pharmaceuticals, which developed VIVJOA (oteseconazole), now approved by the FDA and marketed by Mycovia Pharmaceuticals. He is a venture partner at Hatteras Venture Partners and a consultant to Ancora and Urban Impact Advisors, and he is on the board of directors of PBS, the College Advising Corps, and Saint Louis University. Thorp also serves on the scientific advisory boards of the Yale School of Medicine and the Underwriters’ Laboratories Research Institutes. In 2023, STAT named Thorp to its STATUS list of top leaders in the life sciences.

Thorp is the co-author, with Buck Goldstein, of two books on higher education: “Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century” and “Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership Between America and its Colleges and Universities,” both from UNC Press.