Board of Directors

Board members are elected for two-year terms by the members of the SSA.

Currently they are:

Brendan Murphy was a graduate in mathematical biology, class of 2011, from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and currently continues academic research in nonlinear dynamics, deep brain stimulation, and epilepsy. His first step into the freethought and secular movement was through serving as the Finance Director for Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists - CASH from 2009 to 2011, continuing some of the annual funding legacies laid down by Joe Foley, and assisting in large event organization including debates, panels, and presentations with PZ Myers, Michael Shermer, Greta Christina, and others.

Brendan is also a photographer and musician, having played both drums and piano in numerous orchestras and jazz combos in the past, and hosts a weekly two-hour radio program dedicated to instrumental music.

He plans to attend graduate school at Boston University, pursuing a PhD in computational neuroscience in the fall of 2012.

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Ashley Carter, Secretary (board member since 2012)
St Louis, MO
[ ashley DOT carter AT secularstudents DOT org ] 

Ashley Carter is a 2012 graduate of the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. During law school, she founded and led the Secular Legal Society, one of only a few SSA law school affiliates. During law school, she also led an active chapter of the American Constitution Society and spent one summer interning at the Federal Communications Commission. In 2009, she graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with a B.S. in Political Science and Philosophy. She served as President of the Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers (now the Illini Secular Student Aliance) in 2008-09. During the summer of 2008, she served as an intern for the Secular Student Alliance. In that position, she contributed to an update of the Group Running Guide and made a service trip activity packet. In 2008, she was Outreach Chair for AA&F and planned an unprecedented week-long service trip to New Orleans for her group accompanying a campus religious group, a project which earned an SSA Best Award.

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Frank Bellamy (board member since 2011)
Vienna, VA
[ Frank AT secularstudents DOT org ]

Frank Bellamy's involvement in the secular student movement started when he joined the SSA at the University of Delaware in 2006. After serving as that group's president for two years, he began graduate school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he founded the SSA at RPI and fought hard to get funding for it from the student union. In addition to his work leading SSA affiliates, Frank managed SSA's newsletter, the eMpirical, for almost two years. He greatly enjoyed being a counselor at Camp Quest Chesapeake during the summer of 2011, and hopes to continue his involvement in Camp Quest. In the fall of 2011, he began law school at the University of Virginia, where he founded the Secular Legal Society at UVA.

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Alex DiBranco (board member since 2013)
Medford, MA
[ alex DOT dibranco AT secularstudents DOT org ]

Alex DiBranco has written about gender and sexuality, atheist and interfaith issues, immigration, education, and the Christian Right for outlets including The Nation, Alternet, and Campus Progress. She currently is Communications Director at Political Research Associates, a social justice think tank that studies the right-wing, where she is building communications infrastructure, developing brand identity, and supporting research initiatives.

During her tenure as a Change.org editor and later senior organizer, Alex helped the company grow from six people to more than a hundred employees globally. She provided support for a variety of issue areas, with a focus on campaigns related to women's rights, especially sexual assault, and immigrant rights. She has also served as COO for a technology start-up, and researched human intelligence networks and incidents of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan for the book None of Us Were Like This Before.

While a student at Dartmouth, Alex served as editor-in-chief of the Dartmouth Free Press, a progressive counterpoint to the infamous right-wing Dartmouth Review; was deeply involved with campus activism; and graduated with a degree in English/Creative Writing. Alex will be starting a PhD in Sociology at Yale in fall 2013.

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