Scholars and Practitioners

Meet Your Instructors

Every class is taught by someone who has built their life around what they teach. Scholars, practitioners, and thought leaders with deep connections to 125 years of Newbold College's tradition of faith and learning, each one bringing expertise that goes beyond the academic.

Dr Gifford Rhamie

Senior Lecturer, Newbold College

Dr Gifford Rhamie is a theologian, leadership coach, and consultant with more than two decades of experience equipping leaders across faith communities, universities, corporations, and public-sector organisations on leadership transformation, diversity, equity, and belonging. He has walked alongside leaders through some of the most complex institutional moments of their careers, and this class is built from what he has seen actually work.

Dr Dominique Thomsen

Lifestyle Medicine Specialist and International Speaker

Dr Dominique Thomsen has spent over a decade at the intersection of medical science and sustainable lifestyle change, helping people rebuild their health from the inside out. As co-founder and CEO of Living Alive, a Germany-based lifestyle medicine company, she works with individuals and organisations across Europe and beyond. She has led the development of two medically based wellness centres in the United States, contributed to the American College of Sports Medicine as one of its first certified Exercise-is-Medicine Specialists, and spoken to audiences on four continents. She knows this territory from the inside too: her own journey through injury, burnout, and recovery is what turned her professional expertise into something personal.

Dr Ailson De Moraes

Global Educator & Entrepreneur

Professor Dr Ailson J De Moraes brings over two decades of teaching experience across the UK, Europe, Asia, and Latin America to questions of stewardship, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Formerly a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, he now teaches across MBA programmes linked with institutions including UCL and partner schools internationally. He is founder of i-ConeX Group, a consultancy focused on strategy, entrepreneurship, and leadership development. His published work spans entrepreneurship, emerging markets, and leadership transformation. He is a TEDx speaker known for his journey "from cleaner to global educator" — a lived testimony to the power of faithful stewardship and renewed thinking about resources, opportunity, and purpose.

Dr Dan Serb

Principal, Newbold College of Higher Education

Dr Dan Serb is a scholar-practitioner with more than two decades of experience equipping leaders across faith communities, universities and public-sector organisations on conflict, trust, and leadership transformation. His work sits at the intersection of behavioural science, theology, and lived practice. His teaching at Newbold Connect focuses on practical tools that leaders can use immediately, grounded in research but tested in the kinds of conversations that matter most.

Morton Patterson MBA

Business Strategist & Personal Transformation Coach | Creator, Know Your Value Framework

For over two decades, Morton Patterson has worked with leaders, founders, and independent professionals at the intersection of business strategy and personal transformation, helping them understand why they undervalue themselves. Through his Know Your Value Framework, he bridges the gap between what people charge and what they believe about their own worth—a framework grounded in the conviction that true confidence flows from identity, not performance.

Earlier in his career, Morton worked with organisations including Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, and Canary Wharf Group, before founding Morton Patterson Consulting. He is a mentor and lecturer at York St John University, holds a certified Executive Coach credential through the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centred Coaching programme, and is an NLP Practitioner. His weekly publication, The Business of Value Memo, explores the intersection of pricing, identity, and purpose. He is working on his first book on value to be released soon. His work is shaped by faith and a conviction that you cannot build lasting confidence on performance alone. It comes from understanding who created you and why.

Dr Phil Cooke

Television and Film Producer, Author, Media Consultant

Phil Cooke is a scholar and practitioner with decades of front-line experience at the intersection of Hollywood and the church. As founder of Cooke Media Group, he has produced Super Bowl commercials, major documentaries, and digital campaigns for some of the world's largest organisations and ministries. His ten published books focus on communication, creativity, and how the gospel can be heard clearly in a distracted world.

Phil brings a conviction that ministry deserves to be communicated at the highest level of craft and clarity—not as a compromise with culture, but as faithfulness to the message. He works with leaders across business, ministry, and the public sector to help them cut through the noise and get their message heard. Phil earned his undergraduate degree in Film and Television. He later earned a Master's in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma, and a doctorate from Trinity College and Seminary in Indiana. He currently resides in Los Angeles, where he continues to produce film and consult on media strategy for global organisations.

Dr (H.C.) Marianne Thieme, LL.M.

Theologian and advocate

Marianne is a Dutch theologian and lawyer who has spent three decades working at the intersection of faith, justice, and creation care. She founded the Party for the Animals in 2002, a political movement now represented across European parliaments and beyond. Leading this movement taught her these hard lessons: change begins when ordinary people refuse to accept what everyone says is inevitable. Her reading of Scripture is rooted in both academic rigour and lived conviction. She brings to Newbold Connect the rare gift of someone who has walked the difficult path between faithful tradition and urgent hope, and who knows that the deepest formations happen not in classrooms alone, but when faith travels into Monday.

Dr Chidi Ngwaba

MBBS DRCOG DFSRH MRCGP

Dr Chidi is a British-Nigerian general practitioner trained at Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, and University College London, where he spent years in cardiac surgery before concluding that the most powerful medicine available was alignment between how we eat, how we move, and how the body was designed to function. His father's early death from type 2 diabetes complications became the catalyst for his mission: to equip people with the evidence and practices that prevent and reverse the diseases most medicine treats as permanent. At ten years old, he read Ellen G. White's The Ministry of Healing and spent his entire clinical career confirming what he read through rigorous evidence and personal practice. He brings to Newbold Connect a conviction that the Adventist health message—rooted in 150 years of wisdom—remains the most holistic model of whole-person healing available to the world.

Dr Selina Stone

Lecturer in Theology and Ethics, University of Edinburgh

Dr Selina Stone is a theologian and ethicist whose research and teaching explore power, liberation, vulnerability, and justice—in Christian communities and in social life. She holds a PhD in Pentecostal Theology and Ethics and has served as a Formation Tutor and Lecturer in Theology and Social Justice. Before academia, she worked as a community organiser in South London, challenging exploitative systems alongside people living in precarity—an experience that shapes her conviction that theology must serve liberation and healing, not protect the powerful. She is the author of A Heavy Yoke: Theology, Power and Abuse in the Church (SCM Press, 2025) and Tarry Awhile: Wisdom from Black Spirituality for People of Faith (Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2024), and hosts the Sunday School for Misfits podcast. Her teaching is rooted in the belief that knowledge which does not contribute to justice is not worth having.

Dr Timothy R. Jennings, M.D.

Board-Certified Psychiatrist & Neuroscience

Dr Timothy R. Jennings brings over 35 years of clinical psychiatric experience to his work integrating biblical principles with modern neuroscience. He has practised across inpatient psychiatric units, consultation-liaison psychiatry, law enforcement support, residential treatment, geriatric psychiatry, and private practice — settings that have deepened his conviction that depression, anxiety, trauma, and other conditions are not spiritual failures but measurable brain-body dysfunctions that respond to evidence-backed intervention informed by faith.

In 2010, Dr. Jennings founded Come and Reason Ministries, a non-profit dedicated to bridging the gap between neuroscience and Scripture for mental, spiritual, and relational health. As Medical Director of Honey Lake Clinic, a holistic Christian residential treatment facility in Tennessee, he has spent decades helping people move from shame to understanding, and from confusion to practical healing. His published works — including The God-Shaped Brain, The God-Shaped Heart, and Could It Be This Simple? — translate complex neuroscience into language that makes sense to people of faith. Dr. Jennings's approach is distinctive: he does not separate faith and science, spirituality and brain health, or understanding from practice. His classes are built on the conviction that formation happens when we understand what is actually happening — and then do something about it.