Brandon Vaidyanathan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Rice University. He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Management. His dissertation looks at how religious institutions and practices both shape and are shaped by new forms of capitalism in rapidly-globalizing cities such as Dubai and Bangalore. His other research has examined volunteers in Canada and Italy; call center workers in India; religious practices of American young adults; philanthropy in the US; and causality in American sociology.