Thomas C. Schelling I George Dyson I Eric Gregory I Freeman Dyson I Martin A. Nowak
Robert Wright I Charles L. Harper, Jr.

Nobel laureate in economics Thomas C. Schelling shared his 2005 Bank of Sweden prize with Robert Aumann for enhancing understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis. Dr. Schelling is Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy Emeritus at Harvard University and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He was one of the designer’s of the United States’ Cold War nuclear strategy and played a major role in establishing “strategic studies” as an academic field. In addition, his internationally renowned work, including his widely-translated book, The Strategy of Conflict (1960, 1963, and 1980), prompted new developments in game theory and accelerated its use and application throughout the social sciences. Dr. Schelling is celebrated for the originality and creativity of his theorizing and the intellectual rigor of his policy analysis. Moving easily from real-world issues to elegant models, he distilled the essence of problems ranging from nuclear deterrence and racial segregation to smoking to global warming. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he worked briefly as an analyst at the U.S. Bureau of the Budget before going on to Harvard University where he was elected a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows and earned a Ph.D. in economics in 1951. After completing his doctoral examinations, he took leave to serve with the administration of the Marshall Plan in Europe and then on the White House staff as a foreign policy advisor to the President. He left what had become the Office of the Director for Mutual Security in 1953 to join the faculty of Yale University as an associate professor of economics. His primary theoretical interest was bargaining theory, and he came to see that an immediate and important application of the kind of game theory he had taken up was in military foreign policy, especially nuclear warfare. Dr. Schelling served on the senior staff of the Rand Corporation for a year and went to Washington with a small contingent attached to the staff preparing for the 1958 Geneva Convention on Measures to Safeguard against Surprise Attack. The position he argued in two papers was that arms control should be oriented towards measures that precluded either side’s acquiring a “first-strike” capacity, an objective that entailed assuring the safety of retaliatory nuclear weapons. He held that the only viable position regarding their use would be “no weapons,” not some quantitative or qualitative limits. Accepting a professorship in economics at Harvard in 1958, Dr. Schelling divided his time between the economics department and its Center for International Affairs, then, from its establishment in 1969, the John F. Kennedy School of Government of which he was considered a “founding father”. He was named Littauer Professor in 1974, a title he held until his retirement in 1990. He then accepted appointment as Distinguished University Professor at Maryland where he offered courses in the economics department and the School of Public policy until retiring again in 2003. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and of The Institute of Medicine. Dr. Schelling has served as president of the Eastern Economic Association and the American Economic Association. He is a recipient of the Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy and the NAS Award for Behavioral Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War. He holds honorary doctorates from the RAND Graduate School of Policy Analysis and Erasmus University in Rotterdam. In addition to some two hundred papers published in academic journals or as chapters in volumes of collected works, he is the author of nine books. He wrote two classical economic studies before The Strategy of Conflict, selected as a “Citation Classic” by the Institute of Scientific Information, and followed it with Strategy and Arms Control (1961 and 1985), which he co-authored with Morton H. Halperin, Arms and Influence (1966), Micromotives and Macrobehaviors (1978), Thinking Through the Energy Problem (1979), and Choice and Consequence (1984). His most recent book, Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays, was published by Harvard University Press earlier this year.

George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests have included the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka, 1986), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997), and the exploration of space (Project Orion , 2002). He lives in Bellingham, Washington, has lectured widely, and his books have been well received. James Michener praised Baidarka as “a grand, detailed book that will be a standard for years to come,” Oliver Sacks wrote that Darwin Among the Machines was “a very deep and important book, beautifully written... as remarkable an intellectual history as any I have read,” and Arthur C. Clarke describes Project Orion as “essential reading for engineers/scientists involved with government bureaucracies and the notorious Military Industrial Complex... also vice versa.” Dyson, who believes that our future can best be guided by understanding the beginnings of things, is currently compiling an account of the confluence of people, technology, and ideas surrounding John von Neumann’s Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study, 1945-1958. It was von Neumann's breaking of the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things that realized the dreams of Leibniz, Gödel, and Turing, spawning the digital universe in which our lives are now immersed.

Eric Gregory joined the Princeton faculty in 2001.  His teaching and research interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, bioethics, and the role of religion in public life.  In 2007 he was awarded Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.  A graduate of Harvard College, he did graduate studies in theology as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and received his doctorate in religious studies from Yale University.  He is author of a forthcoming book, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and articles on religion and social ethics, including, "Before the Original Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls" (Journal of Religious Ethics, 2007).  He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  His current project examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice and obligations to strangers in light of the parable of the Good Samaritan.  He is on leave for the academic year 2007-2008, during which time he is a Faculty Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Ethics. 

Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force in World War II. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1945 with a B.A. in mathematics. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. His most useful contribution to science was the unification of the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga. Cornell University made him a professor without bothering about his lack of a Ph. D. He subsequently worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied. He has written a number of books about science for the general public. Disturbing the Universe (1979) is a portrait-gallery of people he has known during his career as a scientist. Weapons and Hope (1984) is a study of the ethical problems of war and peace. Infinite in All Directions (1988) is a philosophical meditation, based on Dyson's Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology given at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999) is a study of one of the major unsolved problems of science. The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999) discusses the question whether modern technology could be used to narrow the gap between rich and poor rather than to widen it. Dyson is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Martin A. Nowak is a professor of biology and mathematics at Harvard University whose research demonstrates the power of mathematics to illuminate diverse aspects of evolutionary biology. He is the founding director of Harvard’s Center for Evolutionary Dynamics. Dr. Nowak has analyzed the consequences of mutation and natural selection in virus infections and cancer progression, pioneered a mathematical approach for the evolution of human language, and invented spatial reciprocity and stochastic game dynamics of finite populations. He is engaged in an ongoing study of the evolution of cooperation and co-directs, with Sarah Coakley, a research program in the Evolution and Theology of Cooperation funded by the John Templeton Foundation. An Austrian by birth, he studied at the University of Vienna where he took first class honors in biochemistry and received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1989. He went on to Oxford University as an Erwin Schrödinger Scholar and worked there with Lord (Robert McCredie) May with whom he co-authored his first book, Virus Dynamics: Mathematical Principles of Immunology and Virology (2000). As Guy Newton Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, he held a Royal Society Research Grant. He subsequently was named a Welcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Biomedical Sciences, the E. P. Abraham Junior Research Fellow at Keble College, Oxford, and then a senior research fellow at Keble. Dr. Nowak became head of Oxford’s Mathematical Biology Group in 1995 and, in 1997, was appointed professor of mathematical biology, a post he held until moving to Princeton a year later to establish the first research program in theoretical biology at the Institute for Advanced Study. He accepted his present position in 2003. A corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Dr. Nowak is the recipient of Oxford’s Weldon Memorial Prize, the Albert Wander Prize given by the University of Bern, the Akira Okubo Prize of the International and Japanese Society for Mathematical Biology, the Roger E. Murray Prize awarded by the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance, the David Starr Jordan Prize given jointly by Stanford, Cornell, and Indiana universities, and the Henry Dale Prize of The Royal Institution. He has delivered numerous named lectures in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States and is a former member of the Templeton Foundation Board of Advisors. Dr. Nowak is the author of more than 250 papers published in scientific journals. His latest book, Evolutionary Dynamics, which was published by Harvard University Press last year, provides an overview of the powerful yet simple laws that govern the evolution of living systems and demonstrates how mathematical biology successfully explicates critical real world problems. 

Robert Wright, a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny and The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, both published by Vintage Books. The Moral Animal was named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 12 best books of 1994 and has been published in 12 languages. Nonzero was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 2000 and has been published in nine languages. Wright's first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information, was published in 1988 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Wright is a contributing editor at The New Republic, Time, and Slate. He has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine. He previously worked at The Sciences magazine, where his column "The Information Age" won the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism.

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); Spiritual Information: 100 Perspectives on Science and Religion in honor of the 90th birthday of Sir John Templeton (Templeton Foundation Press, 2005) (the sequel to this book is currently in development); Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning in 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 Consciousnessin 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.