Dr. Charles L. Harper, Jr.
John Templeton Foundation
Biography
Dr. Charles L. Harper's Abstract
Dr. Charles L. Harper, Jr. is Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation. His primary responsibilities are in the areas of strategic planning, program design and development, vision casting, philanthropic networks development, and talent scouting. He has worked to transform philanthropy by developing innovative entrepreneurial practices in grant making, and has created more than $200 million in grant-based programs ranging widely from the study of forgiveness and reconciliation and enterprise-based solutions for poverty, to projects on foundational questions in physics and cosmology, including topics in chemistry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, medicine, and the philosophy of science. He is the founding Chairman of Geneva Global, Inc., an innovative new philanthropic organization making grants worldwide within the developing world. Initially trained in engineering at Princeton (B.S.E. 1980), he obtained his D.Phil. in planetary science from the University of Oxford for a thesis on the nature of time in cosmology (1988). He also holds the Diploma in Theology from Oxford (1988) and a Certificate of Special Studies in Management and Administration from Harvard (1997). In his science career, he was a National Research Council Fellow at the NASA Johnson Space Center (1988-91) and a research scientist in the Harvard Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and at the Harvard College Observatory (1991-95). His most recent edited publication is Spiritual Information: 100 Perspectives on Science and Religion (Templeton Foundation Press, 2005), to which a sequel consisting of the “10 best” essays is planned. Other scientific publications include more than 50 research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Astrophysical Journal.