Vaidyanathan Brandon

Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame.

Dr. Vaidyanathan’s research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, and scientific institutions, and has been published in journals such as Business and Society, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, and more. He is author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). His work has been funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, the Lilly Endowment, and Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

He is also Founder of Beauty at Work, a media platform which includes a podcast and YouTube channel that aims to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do.