Staff
Graham Reside, Ph.D., Executive Director
Graham Reside comes to the Cal Turner Program with a background in leadership development and academic training in the areas of sociology of religion and morality. His interests include ethics, sociology of culture and religion, sociology of the professions, and the sociology of emotions. Dr. Reside's research and teaching interests are in the role of social institutions as schools of moral formation. Through the shaping of our ideas, values and sentiments, the various professional spheres provide particular moral understandings of the virtuous self and the good society. As the director of the Cal Turner Program, Graham seeks to facilitate discussions across the various professions about their moral purposes and perspectives and to encourage professionals to consider how they contribute to the common good.
Laine Walters Young, Ph.D., Assistant Director of the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership in the Professions
Dr. Laine Walters Young is the Assistant Director of the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership in the Professions at Vanderbilt University. She received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt in Religion, Psychology and Culture, and considers herself a feminist care ethicist working at the intersection of psychology and ethics. She has experience in non-profit administration as well as a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School where she studied Religion in Public Life, storytelling, and the possibilities of pluralism. Further back, she studied journalism and global studies at Pacific Lutheran University, a culmination of growing up in the Pacific Northwest.
At the Cal Turner Program, she directs the interprofessional student fellowship at Vanderbilt, a group of 18 masters-level students who journey together over a year to deepen their moral awareness and gain leadership skill. She also plays a main role in designing and hosting the Program’s additional events, workshops, and courses on a variety of moral leadership subjects such as conflict transformation, restorative justice, educating for trauma-informed care, and cultivating courage.
In her free time, you can find her nose deep in a sci-fi novel, baking with her first-grade son Theodore, or eating her husband’s fabulous cooking.
laine.c.walters.young@vanderbilt.edu
Brennan Perkins, Research Assistant
Brennan Perkins is a Master of Divinity student who grew up in Grant's Lick, Kentucky. After teaching in a public high school for a year, Brennan has turned his attention toward pastoral ministry—pursuing ordination in the United Methodist Church. He's an alumnus of Johnson University in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he studied Homiletics and Theology. His field education currently places him as a chaplain to the dying and their families at a hospice center here in Nashville.
Perkins is concentrating in Religion and the Arts at Vanderbilt's Divinity School, with a particular interest in practical theology and pastoral ministry. He is passionate about the intersection of pastoral care and political theology—especially the politics of death and grief. His research investigates when society is permitted to mourn: how incarceration, capital punishment, and death behind bars complicate the public's ability to grieve, and what people of faith are called to do in response.
His pursuit of these questions—of whose lives, and whose deaths, are counted as grievable—led him to the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership, where he now serves as a research assistant. He believes that strong leadership is not enough without moral conviction behind it, and that pastoral care demands a willingness to sit with the deaths society would rather look away from. Perkins believes the Cal Turner Program has given him a space to wrestle with these convictions alongside others committed to leading with integrity, both in the church and in the world.
Wade Hamilton, Graduate Assistant
Wade Hamilton is a fourth-year medical student at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine pursuing psychiatry. Originally from the small, rural town of Liberty, South Carolina, Wade was a first-generation college student and received his Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from Oberlin College. Early experiences in hospitals as a pre-medical student helped him recognize the many ways healthcare could better serve its patients. He then took a nontraditional path to medicine, seeking experiences that would broaden his understanding of people, institutions, and systems. Before medical school, Wade worked domestically and abroad for business and financial firms in roles spanning project management and human resources. In 2020, he became a volunteer EMT in New York City and later conducted neurology research at Mount Sinai before matriculating at Vanderbilt.
Wade has a long-standing interest in how people find meaning in their lives and make sense of their deepest commitments. This interest shaped his path from co-founding his high school’s Religion and Philosophy Club, to studying Asian contemplative traditions in college, to pursuing a Certificate in Biomedical Ethics alongside his M.D. degree, and ultimately choosing psychiatry. He has traveled widely and studied abroad in both Japan and India to further expand his own perspective.
As Graduate Assistant to the Cal Turner Program, Wade hopes to foster the increasingly rare art of thoughtful, civil conversation about the topics people hold most dear, especially when they profoundly disagree. He hopes that both he and the program’s participants will come away with a clearer understanding of why they believe what they do.
Given a free weekend, you’d likely find him hiking up a mountain or poorly skiing down it. He is an avid cook who enjoys hosting small dinner gatherings with friends.