Stephen G. Post , Ph.D., President
Stephen G. Post, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics in the School of Medicine, Stony Brook University (SUNY). From 1998 through 2008 he was Professor of Bioethics, Philosophy and Religion in the School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University. Post is Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 3rd edition (Macmillan Reference, 2004). He is President of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, founded in 2001 with a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, and devoted to high-level scientific research on unselfish love. Post received his Ph.D. in ethics from the University of Chicago Divinity School (1983), where he was an elected university fellow, a member of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion, and a preceptor in the Pritzker School of Medicine. His work on love, spanning three decades, includes three foci. more >

Matthew T. Lee, Vice President
After studying crime and deviance for over a decade—an effort that produced 30 articles or book chapters and one book on the topic—Matthew R. Lee, Ph.D. (Sociology, University of Deleware), was increasingly drawn to the brighter side of human behavior. This pull toward the positive led him to create the first course on diverse types of love (romantic, parental, altruistic) in the history of the discipline of sociology. He taught the Sociology of Love for the first time in the spring of 2006. It has since been profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education and a number of other publications, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Akron Life and Leisure Magazine, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Canton Repository. Students are encouraged to “put theory into practice” by infusing all of their relationships with a strong dose of thoughtful altruism. Dr. Lee received the Faculty Mentor Award (presented by the graduate students in UA’s Department of Sociology) and was selected as a Favorite Faculty Member (an award presented by Mortar Board and Omicron Delta Kappa). He has been selected twice for inclusion in Who’s Who among America’s Teachers. more >

Cathy M. Lewis, Secretary
Cathy M. Lewis served as Chairperson of the Board of Directors of The Cleveland Foundation, the nation’s first and second largest community foundation, with assets of $1.6 billion, from 2001-2003. For 21 years, she was a minority owner of RESOURCE CAREERS, an international company specializing in spouse employment services for dual-career families. She was the Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Baldwin-Wallace College, a past president of Rainbow Babies and Childrens Hospital, and former trustee of University Hospitals and University Hospitals Health System. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Center for International Child Health at Case Western Reserve University, and is on the Board of Directors of The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, also at Case (www.unlimitedloveinstitute.org). more >

Joni Marra
After a successful career in the for-profit segment, including 10 years as an industrial sales representative and 13 years as an attorney who rose through the organization to lead a major business unit of Westlaw (now Thomson Reuters), Joni chose to exit the hectic race to the top of the corporate ladder, enter the nonprofit world, do good and give back. Joni chose University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Ohio and served as its Director of Corporate & Foundation Relations. After leading her team to raise over 28.5 million dollars in just over 3 years (more dollars than had been raised from corporations and foundations in the history of UH's fundraising efforts), she retired in May of 2008. more >

Judith B. Watson
Judith B. Watson holds Masters’ Degrees from Case Western Reserve University in both Social Service Administration and in Bioethics. Her professional work has been in Pediatric Medical Social work and as a community outreach worker for an Episcopal church. She is an active lay volunteer in the Episcopal Church, holding positions at both the parish and the diocesan level. Her current community volunteer work is with a private agency offering therapy and education for emotionally disturbed toddlers, pre-schoolers and kindergarteners, training for their therapists and research into the needs of both normal and disturbed young children.

John F. Lewis 2002-2011
John F. Lewis is Senior Counsel to a major law firm in Cleveland, Ohio. He served as the managing partner of the firm’s home office for nearly 20 years, playing an integral role in the firm’s expansion from 210 to more than 700 lawyers resident in 26 countries worldwide.

Mr. Lewis is active in groundbreaking efforts to strengthen economic and education development in Cleveland. While Chair of Case Western Reserve University’s trustee board, he was involved in efforts to reach affiliation agreements with the major hospital systems. He also led the implementation of the strategy to execute the largest theater restoration in the world, Playhouse Square Foundation. Mr. Lewis was the founding chairman and a leader of the Cleveland Initiative for Education, which raised $16 million to provide work and college tuition for inner city students through a scholarship program, and promoted corporate partnerships with schools in the Cleveland system.

Richard T. Watson 2002-2011
Former Board member Richard T. Watson passed away in 2011 at the age of 77. He arrived at Harvard College at the age of 16 from Maple Heights, Ohio, and graduated with honors in 1954. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1960. Dick returned to Cleveland and worked for his entire fifty year legal career with Spieth, Bell, McCurdy & Newell. He endowed the Richard T. Watson Chair of Science and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School. He and his family also established the Susan E. Watson Chair in Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. He was at various times President of the Cleveland Council on World Affairs, and a director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Ilex Foundation, and of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. His wife Judy remains a board member of the Institute. Dick was especially interested in the positive rendition of Golden Rule as an expression of love that provided the point of connection between human biological nature and spirituality. He attended the Institute meeting in 1999 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Empathy, Altruism and Agape, where he delighted in encountering this group of thirty leading theologians, philosophers and scientists all convened around the ideal of love of neighbor. From then on, Dick and Stephen G. Post remained close friends, sharing ideas and aspirations for more discovery at the science, spirituality, love interface. Dick was enthusiastic about game theory and saw in mathematical principles a hint of the divine. He was a loyal member of the Institute board for ten years, and he will forever be missed. We thank Dick for his years of service.