Lucas L. Schulte, PhD, brings over a decade of teaching religious studies at colleges, universities, and seminaries to his role as Curriculum & Research Specialist at the Tri-Faith Initiative. Luke successfully petitioned for and earned the first Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln through the Individualized Program of Study major, followed by a Master of Arts in Religion at Yale University Divinity School and a PhD in Religion at Claremont Graduate University. Luke's academic research focused on the religious Other within scriptures of ancient Israel and Judah. While at Claremont, Luke helped co-found and co-chaired the Religions in Conversation Conference, an annual interfaith conference that ran from 2007 to 2016. He also worked summers as part of international teams of scholars on archaeological excavations in Israel at Ramat Raḥel (near Jerusalem) in 2008 and 2009 and Tell Akko (near Acre) in 2010. During graduate school, he helped edit books and volumes on the Dead Sea Scrolls and also a textbook on Zoroastrianism. In 2016, he published as a book through Peeters Publishers a revised and expanded version of his doctoral dissertation on interfaith elements in the biblical book of Nehemiah within the historical, sociological, and religious contexts of the first Persian Empire. More recently Luke has contributed the chapter “Isaiah in the Persian Period” in the forthcoming book The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah by Cambridge University Press. For ten years, Luke taught undergraduate and graduate students as an adjunct professor of religion at a wide range of colleges, universities, and seminaries, such as Pomona College, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Eden Theological Seminary (to name a few). After years of part-time contractual teaching assignments as well as full-time positions in the insurance industry, Luke was thrilled to join full-time the kind of inter-religious work at Tri-Faith for which he had been preparing for the past 20 years. As Curriculum & Research Specialist, Luke focuses in particular on developing curricula for religious literacy, religious diversity, and religious equity.