Arri is the Nat C. Robertson Distinguished Teaching Professor in Science & Society and Professor of Pedagogy in Biology, the Institute of Liberal Arts, and the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta.  He teaches, writes, and does research in science, science education, bioethics, and science and religion.  Arri earned his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Washington in 1990 and has been at Emory ever since, including two year-long stints as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Air Force Academy.

As he developed and taught a novel honors course in introductory biology for over a decade, Arri realized to truly teach science effectively, we must engage it in the broad context.  This set him on a path toward integrating broad life issues into all his teaching.  He established the Emory College Program in Science & Society in 1999, through which he has initiated many projects.  Arri has been a leader in the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative since its inception in 2005.  See his and Yungdrung Konchok’s book on this landmark project, The Enlightened Gene: Biology, Buddhism, and the Convergence that Explains the World (University Press of New England, ForeEdge Imprint, 2017) and a special issue of Frontiers in Communication, “The Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, a Novel Journey in Cross-Cultural Science Education,” is now fully available on-line here.  This issue features 67  authors— monks, nuns, translators, and professors (philosophers, physicists, neuroscientists, and biologists) from 22 colleges and universities— ranging from Emory to Agnes Scott to Cal Tech, and from the University of Nebraska, to Elon, Northwestern, Georgia Gwinnett, and Penn State.  The articles explore diverse aspects of ETSI— research on how monastics learn science, how they experience depression; perspectives on the role of translation in ETSI and education, on how the ETSI experience enriches teaching, thinking, and research in innumerable and surprising ways.