The keynote speaker for QYLC 2012 will be the Reverend Janet M. Cooper Nelson.
The Reverend Janet M. Cooper Nelson is the Chaplain of the University and Director of the Office of Chaplains and Religious Life at Brown University. Appointed at Brown in 1990 she held prior appointments at Vassar and Mount Holyoke College, as well as at The Church of Christ at Dartmouth College. She supervises fieldwork students at Harvard Divinity School and is also a faculty member at Brown’s Alpert Medical School.
Subsequent to an initial teaching career in history in public secondary schools, the United Church of Christ ordained her in 1980. Her current work focuses on topics in religious identity, literacy, interfaith cooperation, educational structure and design, grief, and medical ethics.
Beyond Brown her professional leadership includes: Home and Hospice Care of Rhode Island: The Association of College and University Religious Affairs; AIDS Project Rhode Island; Brown/RISD Hillel Foundation; the Rhode Island Conference of the United Church of Christ; Education as Transformation; and Harvard Divinity School’s Leadership Council.
Her academic degrees were awarded by: Wellesley College, Tufts University, and Harvard Divinity School where she was honored with the Billings Prize for Preaching and the Rabbi Martin Katzenstein Distinguished Alumni award.
