Mary Ellen Giess is chief program officer at Interfaith America overseeing strategy, alignment, and integration across IA’s program areas in higher education, workplaces, and civic communities. Mary Ellen manages high-profile partnerships for IA, including collaborations with the Obama administration on the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge, IA’s five-year longitudinal study on religious diversity in higher education (IDEALS), and most recently Team Up, a national collaborative with YMCA of the USA, Habitat for Humanity International, and Catholic Charities USA. She has served in various roles during her sixteen years at IA, most recently overseeing IA’s democracy and policy initiatives and multi-million-dollar Faith in the Vaccine program.

Mary Ellen is the co-editor of Educating About Religious Diversity and Interfaith Engagement: A Handbook for Student Affairs (2019) and the author of numerous articles including publications in the Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She holds degrees from Harvard Divinity School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.