His initiatives promote mutual respect and engagement among differing groups in workplaces worldwide. He is the world’s leading expert on the relationship between economic sustainability and freedom of religion or belief for all (including those without a religious faith). He led the creation and launch of global indexes measuring Government Restrictions on religion (GRI) and Social Hostilities involving religion (SHI) in all countries while at the Pew Research Center. They have been annually updated since 2007 and are now the recognized annual monitor of restrictions on religion worldwide.

Brian holds a doctorate in quantitative sociology from Penn State University and is the author of scores of academic articles and books. He has affiliations at Baylor University and Boston University and is on the advisory board of Notre Dame University Law School’s Religious Liberty Initiative and on the advisory board for Chaplaincy Innovation Lab launched at Brandeis University. He is also an advisor for the World Economic Forum’s ongoing Faith in Action initiative and the former chair of the World Economic Forum’s global council on the role of faith and a speaker at Davos.

Brian was previously an advisor for the religion & geopolitics project of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and an associate scholar at the Religious Liberty Project at Georgetown University. He was a speaker at the first-ever TEDx event at the Vatican. He was also instrumental in setting up the first western-style business school in the former Soviet Union. His books include The Price of Freedom Denied (Cambridge Univ. Press), The World Religion Database (Brill), The World’s Religions in Figures (Wiley), and The Yearbook of International Religious Demography (Brill).

He and his wife, Julia Beth, live at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and are co-authors of Grims’ New Fairy Tales of Love Overcoming Evil.