Meet Our Team

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Associate Director, Duke Divinity School Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative; Assistant Research Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School; Assistant Professor, Population Health Sciences, Duke’s School of Medicine; Durham, NC, USA. He has been studying the church's response to the opioid crisis in Appalachia, and has collaborated on grants and co-authored articles with Uplift Appalachia board members. The Duke Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (Duke TMC) has been involved with Uplift Appalachia efforts since its inception.

Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA. Author of "Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development," and "Problems of Dependence in Uganda,"  She and her colleagues are currently studying the church's response to the substance use disorder crisis in Appalachia. They collaborate with Uplift Appalachia regularly.

Associate Professor, Division of Nursing; Director, Accelerated BSN Program, DeSales University.  Her research interests include religiosity and health, maternal/child health, and trauma informed care. She publishes regularly on religious commitment and health and has collaborated with Andi Clements, Uplift Appalachia president on multiple articles and conference presentations.

Professor of theology at King’s College, Wilkes Barre, PA, USA. He is currently co-authoring a book with Andi Clements on the church response to the opioid crisis. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and four books: The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine and the Church (1999), Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine and the Distortion of Christianity with Keith Meador (2003), Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine with Dr. Brian Volck (2006), and To Live is to Worship: Bioethics and the Body of Christ (2007). He co-edited and contributed to the volume of essays, Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's Earthly Home in 2009. 

Prof. Cook, Department of Theology and Religion and Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing at Durham University, Durham UK, has been a longtime collaborator, and is an expert in the intersection of addiction and theology. He received the Canterbury Cross (2020) for interdisciplinary work on theology and psychiatry from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Oskar Pfister Award (2021) from the American Psychiatric Association for outstanding contributions in the field of psychiatry and religion. 

Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, King's College, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. He collaborates by co-authoring articles with Uplift Appalachia board members and staff.

Director, Center for Integrative Addiction Research (CIAR), Senior Research Fellow & Clinical and Health Psychologist, Department of Religious Studies, University of Vienna; Vienna, Austria. He is one of a group of guest editors with Andi Clements, editing a special issue of Frontiers in Psychiatry: Addictive Disorders, Frontiers in Psychology: Health Psychology, Frontiers in Psychology: Philosophical and Theoretical Psychology, and Frontiers in Human Neuroscience titled Human Connection as Treatment for Addiction.

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center, Esther Colliflower Associate Research Professor of Pastoral and Moral Theology; Co-Director, Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative; Durham, NC, USA. Through his affiliation with Duke TMC, he conducts trainings for and consults with Uplift Appalachia.

Associate Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology; Coordinator, Global Health Initiatives, College of Public Health; Associate Director of Extramural Funding and Innovation, Strong BRAIN Institute (SBI); Research Faculty, Center for Rural Health Research; East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee. She collaborates on research and evaluation efforts within grant applications.