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 (at a level of about $20 million per annum), vision casting, and worldwide talent scouting in areas relevant to the Foundation’s activities. Dr. Harper has created more than $100 million in new grant-based research programs ranging widely from the study of forgiveness and reconciliation to projects focused on foundational questions in physics and cosmology, including topics in chemistry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, medicine, and the philosophy of science. He also covers the Foundation’s portfolio in the area of research and public education on enterprise-based solutions to poverty and has created a number of large programs in this area. In addition, Dr. Harper was Founding Chairman of the innovative philanthropic organization Geneva Global Inc., which is transforming grantmaking in the developing world by incorporating business practices into philanthropy. Similarly, at the John Templeton Foundation, he has worked to transform philanthropy by adopting appropriate business models and developing innovative entrepreneurial practices in grantmaking.

Before joining the John Templeton Foundation, Dr. Harper’s scientific research career included a National Research Council fellowship at the NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, from 1988 to 1991. From 1991, he was employed at Harvard University as a research scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and was made an associate of the Harvard College Observatory in 1995. In his work as a planetary scientist, he specialized in galaxy evolution and the origins of our solar system, especially the earliest history of the Earth and moon.

Dr. Harper was trained in engineering at Princeton University. He subsequently earned a doctorate from the University of Oxford (Balliol College) for a thesis on the nature of time in cosmology. During his thesis research, he was awarded a Squire-Marriot scholarship to study theology at Oxford and was granted the Diploma in Theology. Later, he was awarded a Certificate of Special Studies in Management and Administration from Harvard University.

With John Barrow and Paul Davies, Dr. Harper is co-editor of Science & Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity (Cambridge University Press, 2004), published in honor of physicist John Archibald Wheeler. He is editor of Spiritual Information: One Hundred Perspectives (Templeton Foundation Press, 2005) in honor of Sir John Templeton’s ninetieth birthday. A co-edited volume with John Barrow, Simon Conway Morris, and Stephen Freeland, tentatively entitled Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine Tuning, is scheduled for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2006. His other publications include more than fifty research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Astrophysical Journal on topics ranging from Big Bang nucleosynthesis to the age and chemical evolution of the galaxy and the early geological history of Earth’s core, crust, oceans, and atmosphere.

Dr. Harper has worked as a volunteer in both Pakistan and Thailand in development, disaster assistance, and refugee affairs. He also worked in the state of Oregon with Youth for Christ as a counselor in a home for delinquent boys. Dr. Harper is an avid mountaineer and skier, having served on the Mount Hood Mountain rescue team. The father of four children, he is married to Susan Billington Harper, a Rhodes Scholar, historian of Christian missions, and former lecturer in British imperial history at Harvard.