COHE tech staff page

As Associate Director of the Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS), Mary Ellen Sikes was primarily responsible for the Institute's technology initiatives. COHE, the most ambitious of these projects to date, employed her as web analyst and technical leader, focusing on site architecture, design, graphics, and management of the project's technical development phase. Sikes also contributed to the overview for the Science and Humanism study area.

Sikes served as webmaster for the main IHS site, the Institute's Humanists.net free hosting program for humanist and related projects, the Darwin World Site, and the Secular Coalition for America.

With a degree in mathematics with honors from Virginia Tech, her technical background includes software development and analysis in government, industry, and higher education. Sikes's professional work before joining IHS focused on educational technology in public schools, where she taught programming languages, Web design, and computer skills to students and staff.

Sikes has been an activist in the humanist movement for many years. She is immediate past president of America's largest local humanist organization, Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH). With six chapters and 400 members, WASH serves the nation's capital and surrounding states and is viewed as one of the most established and successful grassroots humanist organizations in the nation. Sikes founded WASH's Central Virginia chapter in 1995 and coordinated local activities, membership, and public relations until 2001.

In 1999 WASH published Sikes's essay, Secular Humanist Ethics and the Next Generation, as a chapter in its book, Humanism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. She is a regular contributor to WASHline, the monthly newsletter of WASH. Sikes has appeared on National Public Radio's Diane Rehm Show and has been interviewed for articles in the Washington Post and other local media.

In 2003 Sikes was elected to the National Advisory Council of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, as well as to the General Advisory Board of the Secular Student Alliance. She has presented at national conferences of both the American Humanist Association (AHA) and the Council for Secular Humanism. Sikes represented the humanist perspective at a May 2003 colloquy co-sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C. The topic was "Teaching About Religion in Public Schools."