Organizers
Convener:
Charles L. Harper, Jr., Senior Vice President, John Templeton Foundation, Philadelphia, United States
charper@templeton.org
http://www.templeton.org/
Charles L. Harper, Jr., D.Phil. 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. Dr. Harper has worked to transform philanthropy by instituting innovative entrepreneurial practices in grant making, creating 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 and other scientific topics in biochemistry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, medicine, and the philosophy of science. He is the founding Chairman of Geneva Global, Inc., an innovative philanthropic organization making grants worldwide within the developing world, reflecting his special interests in trade and solutions to poverty that include promoting a vision for major reforms focused on entrepreneurs and wealth creators in the commercial aid sector and avoidance of charitable dependency among aid recipients. Initially trained in engineering at Princeton (B.S.E. 1980), Dr. Harper 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 University (1997). In his science career, Dr. Harper was a National Research Council Fellow at NASA’s 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).
For the John Templeton Foundation, he has developed a number of science-based interdisciplinary symposia and related research volumes, including The Fountain of Youth: Cultural, Scientific, and Ethical Perspectives on a Biomedical Goal based on the Extended Life, Eternal Life symposium co-sponsored by the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, March 2000 (Oxford University Press, NY, 2003); Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity in honor of the 90th birthday of John A. Wheeler based on the symposium in Princeton, March 2002 (Cambridge University Press, UK, 2004); Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuningin honor of the legacy of Lawrence J. Henderson based on the symposium at Harvard University, October 2003 (Cambridge University Press, UK, forthcoming fall 2007); Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness in honor of the 90th birthday of Charles H. Townes based on the symposium at the University of California, Berkeley, October 2005 (Cambridge University Press, UK, forthcoming in 2008); and Horizons of Truth: Logics, Foundations of Mathematics, and the Quest for Understanding the Nature of Knowledge in honor of the legacy of Kurt Gödel based on the symposium at the University of Vienna, April 2006 (Cambridge University Press, NY, forthcoming in 2008). Currently, Dr. Harper is developing several similar symposia and book projects in addition to other special programs for the Foundation. Other scientific publications include more than 50 research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Astrophysical Journal.
