Brian J. Grim, Ph. D., is president of the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF) and a leading expert on how faith and business build a better world. He is also the Global Chairman of the Biannual Business & Interfaith Peace Awards and Symposium.
Brian recently served as chair of the World Economic Forum’s global agenda council on the role of faith (2015-16) and was a speaker at the Forum’s 2018 annual meeting in Davos as well as being a TEDx speaker. Brian also supports and works closely with the “Business for Peace” platform of the United Nations Global Compact.
Brian’s recent widely reported research finds that religion contributes $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy annually, more than the combined revenues of the top 10 technology U.S. companies including Apple, Amazon and Google.
Brian is also a member of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and a speaker at the annual Forum on Workplace Inclusion.
Brian is a global expert on international religious demography and the socio-economic impact of restrictions on religious freedom. He is a research associate at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs (CURA) and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Institute for the Studies of Religion (ISR) at Baylor University. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute in Washington, DC.
Brian was previously an advisor for the religion & geopolitics project of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and an associate scholar at the Religious Liberty Project at Georgetown University and.
Prior to becoming the Foundation’s founding president in 2014, Brian directed the largest social science effort to collect and analyze global data on religion at the Pew Research Center. He also worked for two decades as an educator in the former Soviet Union, China, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Brian holds a doctorate in sociology from the Pennsylvania State University and is author of numerous articles and books including The Price of Freedom Denied (Cambridge Univ. Press), The World Religion Database (Brill), The World’s Religions in Figures (Wiley) and The Yearbook of International Religious Demography (Brill).
Brian has appeared as an expert on global religion on numerous media outlets, including CNN, BBC, Fox, CBS, C-SPAN, and regularly presents to high level audiences throughout the world including the White House, State Department, European Parliament, the Vatican, and various the United Nations bodies including the Human Rights Council, and the UN Alliance of Civilizations and the UN Global Compact.
Brian is recipient of many academic and civil awards, including:
- – 2018 World Peace Award
- – 2017 Korean Peninsula Peace Prize
- – 2017 Pontifical University Religious Freedom Award
- – 2016 Distinguished Article Award from the American Sociological Association
- – 2016 Religious Freedom Award, from the North American Religious Liberty Association
- – 2012 European Population Association Research Award
- – 2010 World Association for Public Opinion Research outstanding research article award
- – 2009 Distinguished Article Award from the American Sociological Association