Professor of Communication, affiliate faculty in Religious Studies and a Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University. She is also director of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies, and a founder of Digital Religion studies. Her research focuses on technology, religion and digital culture, with emphasis on Jewish, Muslim & Christian media negotiations. She is co-editor of Routledge’s Religion and Digital Culture book series and the Journal of Religion, Media & Digital Culture. She is author of over 100 articles and books including When Religion Meets New Media (2010), Digital Religion (2013, 2ⁿᵈ edition 2021), Digital Creatives and the Rethinking Religious Authority (2021). She is the co-editor (with John Dyer) of Ecclesiology for a Digital Church: Theological Reflections on a New Normal (2022). She has been quoted in such outlets as the Houston Chronicle, USA Today, The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and on the BBCWorld Service. She also received the RCA Scholar of the Year Award and TAMU’s Transformational Teaching Award.

Ms. So Young-Kang

So-Young Kang is a highly sought out speaker globally on multiple topics across Future of Work, Digitization, Transformation. Innovation, Leadership, Culture, Strategy, Education/EdTech and Entrepreneurship. She is an author, Huffington Post blogger, and frequent guest on Channel News Asia (Asian TV news channel), and has spoken to audiences that include leaders from multi-national corporations, governments, educational institutions, and social impact organizations. From the TEDx stage to The World Economic Forum, to innovation conferences to women’s leadership forums, So-Young is a powerful speaker who is described as “engaging”, “thought-provoking,” and “inspiring.”

So-Young is a pioneer and serial entrepreneur constantly looking at new ways of solving big challenges. Her latest challenge is focused on how to maximize human potential and reach a billion people through founding Gnowbe, an innovative mobile-first training and engagement platform focused on driving behavior change for real impact. This was spun-out from her first company, Awaken Group, a multi-disciplinary Transformation Design (TD) firm that integrates strategy, leadership and innovation to catalyze change. Her experiences also include McKinsey & Company, Harvard Business School and Citigroup. With the impact of her work, she was nominated to be a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2014.

Mr. Arun Kumar

Arun Kumar has over 10 years of experiences across oil and gas engineering, social works, startups, learning and development, training, community building and marketplaces. He started off as one of the first scholars of the Honda Dreams Fund which propelled him to graduate with a Masters in Engineering at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia. Through an on-campus interview which he was strongly motivated to attend by his then professor and late-mentor, he landed a job as an oil & gas engineer in the USA and then Australia, traveling 80% of the time, learning different cultures and demographics of people from all over the world. Arun is essentially a storyteller who is passionate about bridging the gap between technology and society. He has spoken on BFM’s Raise Your Game 4 times where his talks on topics like Industry 4.0, Talentism, Language & Cultures and Mentoring have attracted invitations for corporate speaking engagements. He is currently a Product Manager by profession where he bridges business goals, user needs and engineering capacities to build and innovate tech products. Arun is also the Founder of Waymaker (www.waymaker.works), a peer-to-peer support platform to facilitate the transactions of help within the community, that was built and launched in late 2020 and has since facilitated help to hundreds of individuals and families as well as being featured on several major local publications.

Dr. Bernard Wong

Dr. Bernard Wong is President and Associate Professor of Theological Studies at China Graduate School of Theology (CGST), Hong Kong. He gained his PhD in Christian Ethics from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Illinois, USA. He is the author of Beginning from Man and Woman: Witnessing Christ’s Love in the Family (2017), and Co-editor of Asian Christian Ethics: Evangelical Perspectives (2022).

Dr Wong began pastoral ministry as Assistant Pastor of Christian and Missionary Alliance Yau Tong Church, Hong Kong, before moving into the ministry of theological education, and is now Adjunct Pastor at the same church. Prior to his theological studies he had a career in engineering having studied Chemical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA.

Dr. Kyungwha Hong

Dr. Hong officially joined Torch Trinity in 2011. Her higher education has focused mostly on understanding children, adolescents, and their environments. She received her BA in educational psychology from Ehwa Womans University (Seoul) before going on to receive her MS in marital & family therapy from Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena, CA, USA). She also earned an EdM & EdD in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education (Cambridge, MA, USA). Before coming to Torch Trinity, she was with the Talent R&D Center for two years and worked with the Global Talent Research Center at Seoul National University. Together they developed the Global Talent Indicator (GTI) which is a self-report measure that assesses adolescent capacities needed to work in today’s global society.