Eileen Barker, FBA, OBE, is professor of sociology, with special reference to the study of religion, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interest over the past 25 years has been, and continues to be, cults, sects and new religious movements and the social reactions to which they give rise. Since 1989 she has spent a significant amount of time investigating changes in the religious situation in Eastern Europe. The majority of her research involves living with and/or interviewing those whom she studies, but she has conducted several surveys and is currently responsible for the British part of a large international study of religious and moral pluralism.

She has published extremely widely in this field, with more than 170 publications, including the award-winning The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice? and New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction, which has been published in seven languages. She is a familiar commentator on religious matters on both radio and television, and serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals. She has been elected as an officer on the boards of most of the international organisations related to the sociology of religion--being the only non-American to have been elected president of the largest of these, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In 2000 the American Academy of Religion awarded her the prestigious Martin E. Marty prize for the Public Understanding of Religion.

In 1988, with the support of the Home Office and the mainstream churches, she set up INFORM, a charity based at the LSE which supplies information about the new religions and which is as objective and up-to-date as possible. For this work she was awarded an OBE in the New Year's Honours List.