You are warmly invited to attend a special partners’ track at the 2024 Annual Meeting. Sessions offered will allow you to engage more deeply with the Consortium and study center leaders, learn about strategic initiatives within the movement, and explore a vision for Christian higher education on secular college and university campuses. The Partners’ Track is designed to overlap with the Annual Meeting and will begin on the evening before the Annual Meeting starts.

Mia Chung

Concert Pianist & Executive Director of the Octet Collaborative

Pianist Mia Chung served most recently as Professor of Musical Studies and Performance at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, having joined the faculty in 2012 for her expertise in piano performance and interpretive analysis of tonal and atonal compositions. Chung’s CD and DVD recordings of works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms among others have earned high praise and awards. Chung was the first prize winner of the Concert Artists Guild Competition and recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the highest national recognition for concert artists. She has since performed in numerous concert halls around the world including the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw, Symphony Hall in Boston, and Lincoln Center in New York City. Her latest topic of interest is Chinese modernist music composed after the Cultural Revolution. Chung’s first monograph, Chinese Emigré Composers and Divergent Modernisms: Chen Yi and Zhou Long, will be published in early 2024 by Cambridge University Press (Elements, Music After 1945 Series).  Mia was inspired to establish and lead the Octet Collaborative at MIT after visiting Chesterton House at Cornell as a guest lecturer in 2018. Dr. Chung earned her BA magna cum laude in Music from Harvard College, a Master of Music degree from Yale University, and a Doctorate in Musical Arts from the Juilliard School.

Christopher Clemens

Provost & Chief Academic Officer at UNC

Christopher “Chris” Clemens, Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has a passion for collaborating and building great things with others. Clemens arrived at UNC in 1998 from Caltech, where he was a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellow in Astronomy. Previously, Clemens was a NASA Hubble Fellow at Iowa State University and received his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin (1994) and a Bachelor of Science in Astrophysics from the University of Oklahoma (1985). He is a dedicated mentor of graduate students and in 2012 received the Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring.

From 2012-2016, Clemens served as chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and from 2016-2019 as Senior Associate Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the College. In his role as Senior Associate Dean, he supported the development of the new IDEAs in Action Curriculum, and advocated for building students’ capacities for public discourse and debate. In 2019-2020 he led the effort to establish the Program for Public Discourse and served as its acting director. In 2019 he became the inaugural Associate Dean of Research and Innovation for the College of Natural Sciences, and currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Convergent Science, a pan-campus institute that is supporting research teams as they develop ideas, inventions, and technologies for commercial or practical use.

Greg Jones

President of Belmont University

Greg Jones became president of Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on June 1, 2021. Prior to his appointment at Belmont, he served as the longtime dean of Duke Divinity School (from 1997-2010 and again from 2018-mid 2021). Between 2010 and 2018, he served in a variety of roles, including vice president and vice provost for global strategy at Duke University and provost and executive vice president of Baylor University.

Jones is the author or editor of 19 books, including the recently released Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas (with Andrew P. Hogue) which outlines his perspective on traditioned innovation as “a habit of being and living that cultivates a certain kind of moral imagination shaped by storytelling and expressed in creative, transformational action.” Other works include Christian Social Innovation, the co-authored Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace (with Celestin Musekura), the co-authored Resurrecting Excellence (with Kevin R. Armstrong), and the widely acclaimed Embodying Forgiveness. An ordained United Methodist minister, he has published more than 200 articles in a variety of publications.

Jones is also a gifted speaker, media contributor and thought leader in higher education, social innovation and theology. He recently joined the National Leadership Council for the Partnership for American Democracy and currently serves as a senior fellow at Leadership Education, which he founded, and senior fellow at the Fuqua-Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics.

Karl Johnson

Executive Director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers

Prior to becoming Executive Director in 2021, Karl served as Founder of Chesterton House at Cornell. He received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Cornell University and served for ten years as the inaugural Dan Tillemans Director of the Cornell Team and Leadership Center. In 2008, Karl became a founding board member of the Consortium—he served on the board for ten years and as board chair for five years. Karl received an M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell’s Department of Natural Resources where he focused on the history and philosophy of recreation and leisure. In 2000, Karl founded Chesterton House, a Center for Christian Studies at Cornell. The ministry began with public lectures and discussion groups on wide-ranging topics, grew to include accredited courses and eventually developed a two-acre campus housing over forty students living in intentional Christian community.