Karen McGuire is the administrator of the Baptist Joint Committee in Washington, DC. She has served as Associate Dean of Students/Student Center Director for a small Baptist College in Florida, editorial manager for a religious publishing house and a number of government agencies in the Washington, DC area. She is a graduate of Palm Beach Atlantic College in West Palm Beach where she earned a Master of Education in Adult Education. She serves on the Board of Directors for CrossLink International, Ltd., a humanitarian aid ministry and as a trustee for the John Leland Center for Theological Studies in the Washington, DC area.

Since April of 1995, Michael H. Merson, M.D. has served as the first Dean of Public Health and as a professor and Chairman of the Department of Epidemiol-ogy and Public Health at Yale University School of Medicine. He also serves as the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale. Prior to coming to Yale, he worked for seventeen years with the World Health Organization (WHO), first as Director of the WHO Diarrheal Diseases Control and Acute Respiratory Control Programs and subsequently as Executive Director of the WHO Global Program on AIDS. Before joining WHO he was engaged in research on the etiology and epidemiology of diarrheal diseases in the United States and abroad and authored more than 150 publications on this and other subjects. Dean Merson is a graduate of Amherst College, received his medical degree from the State University of New York, and did his medical residency at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Recently he has written on global AIDS policy issues which is his current major area of interest. He has received two commendation medals from the United States Public Health Service, and is a recipient of both the Arthur S. Fleming Award for distinguished government service and the Surgeon General's Exemplary Service Award.

Sarah Payne Naylor is a partner in The Naylor Group. Ms. Naylor has provided project support for AIDS National Interfaith Network for four years, initiating the Red Ribbon Partnership, a project supported by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, which has been one of the springboards for the AIDS & Religion in America Convocation. Through The Naylor Group she served on a six-person research team for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to assess the National Interfaith Volunteer Caregiver Program. Prior to her work in The Naylor Group, Ms. Naylor was an Assistant Director in the Lutheran Office for Governmental Affairs in Washington, DC. She worked on health care policy which supported the Ryan White CARE Act, and served as the National Chairperson for the Inter-religious Health Care Access Campaign. Prior to moving to the East Coast, Sarah Payne Naylor was the Director of the Arizona Office for Governmental Ministry.

Rev. Pat Enkyo O'Hara, Ph.D., is a Zen Buddhist Teacher, or Sensei, in the White Plum Lineage, an American Soto Zen family. She leads the Village Zendo in New York City. A Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, she manages the Buddhist AIDS Network and guides meditation groups at Gay Men's Health Crisis and at prison and parolee HIV/AIDS support groups. She now serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of AIDS National Interfaith Network and is committed to focusing a Buddhist perspective on issues of difference around race, class, sexuality and health.