Dr. Hector Avalos is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University. He also is the founder and Director of the U.S. Latino Studies Program at ISU, and the Executive Director of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, a part of the Council for Secular Humanism based in Amherst, New York.

A former fundamentalist preacher born in Mexico, he has a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. In 1991, he became the first Mexican American to obtain a Ph.D. in Biblical and Near Eastern Studies from the Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where he studied under F.M. Cross, a pioneer in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls.