The Team
Project Leader
Ray Pennings is Senior Fellow and Director of Research at Cardus, working out of our Calgary office, where he lives with his wife Kathy and son, Chris.
Ray brings a host of skills to Cardus, being one of Canada's top authorities in industrial relations, as well as public policy, political activism and political affairs generally. He has headed several of Cardus' largest research projects over the years, including Buying a Labour Monopoly: An Examination of Job Targeting Programs and their Operation in the Canadian Construction Sector" (1998), "Competitively Working in Tomorrow's Construction"...
Advisor
John Seel is a Senior Fellow with Cardus and president of Vancouver and Los Angeles-based Transcend Entertainment, a division of nCore Media, a super computer company that provides high performance computing solutions to the entertainment industry for computer generated images and special effects.
Seel is a cultural renewal entrepreneur-putting legs on visions that foster human flourishing and the common good. John's career combines business, education, theology, and cultural sociology. He was actively involved in the founding of The Williamsburg Charter, The Trinity Forum, Institute for Advanced...
Head, Quantitative Study
David Sikkink serves on the Research Team of the Cardus Education Survey project. He completed his doctorate in sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and has been in Sociology at Notre Dame since 1999. His main research interests are in education, religion, and politics. His dissertation explained how religious and community factors shape views of schooling for children, including parents' choice of private schooling and opposition to public schools. It also showed how differences in the organization of public, magnet, Catholic and other religious schools affect parents'...
Head, Qualitative Study
Deani A. Neven Van Pelt, B.Com. (McMaster), B.Ed. (Toronto), M.Ed. (UWO), Ph.D. (UWO), is Associate Professor of Education at Redeemer University College where she serves as Director of Teacher Education. A former teacher in math and business departments of public and private secondary schools, she now instructs courses in social and legal foundations of education. As primary researcher and co-investigator in several international collaborations, her education policy research on private schooling, religious schooling, and home schooling has been featured by national media. She authored an...
Editor
Dr. Kathryn L. Wiens has served in both suburban and urban public and independent schools as a classroom teacher and school system administrator. Currently, she works as the Associate Director of the Council on Educational Standards and Accountability and as an adjunct professor at Wheaton College in both the science and education departments.
Kathryn holds a doctorate in education policy, planning, and administration from Boston University, a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of St. Thomas, and a Bachelor's degree in biology and Science education from the University...
