Dr Terry Babcock-Lumish

Dr Terry Babcock-Lumish is the sixth - and first female - Executive Secretary of the Truman Foundation, the “living memorial” to U.S. President Harry S. Truman and America's national monument to public service. Created by Congress in 1975, the Foundation was President Truman's idea. A pragmatic Midwesterner who did not attend university, President Truman did not want a brick-and-mortar monument. Instead, he encouraged a living memorial that would give life to the values of service that animated his career. In that spirit, the Truman Foundation supports aspiring leaders in answering the call to serve.

Previously, Dr Babcock-Lumish founded and led Islay for fifteen years, providing strategic guidance for philanthropic foundations and other mission-driven organizations across six continents. Representative clients included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brooks World Poverty Institute, Clinton Global Initiative, His Royal Highness Prince Feisal Al Hussein's Generations for Peace, and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. Recent years' academic affiliations include the University of Arizona, City University of New York, the University of Delaware's Biden School, Harvard Law School, the University of Oxford, and the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she developed West Point's first behavioral economics course and a civilian-military partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. Dr Babcock-Lumish also served as the founding Director of Public Policy at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, dedicated to education, research, and civic engagement, in the historic New York City home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She has served in local, state, and federal government for both Democratic and Republican administrations, and as a researcher for two books by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. From 1999-2001, she was a Presidential Management Fellow at the Treasury Department and in the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Dr Babcock-Lumish completed her BS at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was named a Truman Scholar, and earned an MPA in environmental and technology policy as a Lilly Community Assistance Fellow at Indiana University's O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. She read her DPhil in economic geography at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar. Her research interests are at the intersection of science, technology, and society.