Staff

Patrick Langdale Hough

President & Director

Patrick Langdale Hough is President and Director of Elm Institute. For over a decade he has worked at the intersection of venture philanthropy, research, and cultural entrepreneurship, directing and advising unique projects within and alongside leading research universities in the United States and United Kingdom. He has served on the boards of various foundations and grassroots organizations that share a fundamental desire to further deeper understandings of the human person and the common good. Flowing from these professional commitments, his intellectual interests over the years have been guided by the themes of friendship, beauty, stewardship, cultural practices and community, and transcendence.

He is Associate Fellow of Grace Hopper College at Yale University. He studied classics and medieval studies at Princeton University and theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.

A native of the Shoreline, Hough lives in Guilford with his wife and their six children. He is a passionate gardener, apiarist, and breeder of Icelandic sheep, and is a member of various societies of natural, historical and agricultural preservation in the town of Guilford.

E-mail: patrick.hough@elminstitute.org

Peter Wicks, PhD

Scholar-in-Residence 

Educated at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Dr. Wicks came to the United States as Jane Eliza Procter Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Graduate School before pursuing his doctoral studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2010. After spending a year on a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, Dr. Wicks taught in the Ethics Program at Villanova University as a Catherine of Siena Fellow. His research focuses on the contemporary applications of Aristotelian ethical and political thought, the intellectual foundations of utilitarianism, and the psychology and ethics of argument and persuasion. Along with Kelvin Knight he is the co-editor of The MacIntyre Reader (forthcoming, fall 2025, from the University of Notre Dame Press). He is currently completing a book, The Ethics of Peter Singer: A Study of Utilitarianism in Theory and Practice, which examines the sources of the appeal of utilitarianism in contemporary culture through a critical examination of the work of the contemporary philosopher Peter Singer.

E-mail: peter.wicks@elminstitute.org