---
title: "John Templeton Foundation"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:31:44.745375+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== Black Hole Initiative ====
In 2016, the foundation granted over seven million dollars to the Black Hole Initiative (BHI), an interdisciplinary program at Harvard University that includes the fields of Astronomy, Physics and Philosophy, and is said to be the first center in the world to focus on the study of black holes. Notable principal participants include Sheperd Doeleman, Peter Galison, Avi Loeb, Ramesh Narayan, Andrew Strominger, and Shing-Tung Yau. The BHI Inauguration was held on 18 April 2016 and was attended by Stephen Hawking; related workshop events were held on 19 April 2016.

==== Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute ====
In 2015, the Santa Fe Institute was awarded a three-year, $2.5 million grant to support the development of a general theory of complexity, constituting "a concise, parsimonious, and potentially mathematizable framework for understanding complex adaptive systems".

=== Biology and human development ===

In 2016, the foundation awarded $5.4 million to the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FfAME) to study the origin of life on Earth, particularly investigating questions of how early RNA interacted with water, which is necessary for life but also degrades RNA, and how the introduction of energy to organic materials yielded life rather than turning it into tar. The project is headed by molecular biophysicist and chemist Steven A. Benner. The foundation also awarded an $8 million grant to a program examining a theory in evolutionary biology called extended evolutionary synthesis. This project is headed by evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland.
Several grants specifically supported inquiry into various aspects of human evolution. A 2014 grant of $4.9 million supports an effort at Arizona State University by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson to explore how we became human, and a $3.2 million grant to Indiana University and the Stone Age Institute supports the study of "what factors led human ancestors to develop skills like making tools, developing language, and seeking out information".
In March 2019, the foundation provided the bulk of a group of grants adding up to over $7 million to enable the Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Science (The Brain Institute) at Chapman University to examine "how the human brain enables conscious control of decisions and actions".
A grant from the foundation supports a study of religion and health conducted by Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard University. VanderWeele is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and co-director the University's Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality. His research has focused on the application of causal inference to epidemiology, as well as on the relationship between religion and health.
In June 2019, the foundation awarded one of its largest grants to the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School for its Ancient DNA Atlas project that seeks to sequence the DNA of ancient human remains to tell the story of human migration and development through the addition of DNA sequences of 10,000 individuals spanning 50,000 years. The funding was used to solve a riddle that had puzzled historians, classicists, linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists for 200 years - whether the bulk of the European civilization had arrived from Anatolia or the Pontic Steppes of Central Asia, and how Indo-European languages spread over an enormous geographical area from Britain to India, becoming the largest linguistic group today.
The funding was used to embrace a multi-disciplinary approach and crowd-sourced results before the final manuscripts were completed, receiving commentary and feedback from academics of various institutions on several continents, according to geneticist David Reich, lead researcher on the project. The study was also funded by the governments of the US, Russia, Germany (Max Planck Institute), European Union and India. Results have been published in Science and Cell.

=== Social sciences ===

==== Pew Research Center ====

The Pew Research Center, an American fact tank or research organization, has been "jointly and generously funded" by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the foundation for its studies focusing on demographics of religions in the world, part of the series entitled Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures.

==== Center on Religion and Chinese Society ====
The Center on Religion and Chinese Society of the Purdue University in Indiana is funded by the foundation. The current director of the center, the Chinese American Christian scholar Fenggang Yang, has been granted more than $9.5 million to support his projects, The center has published research on religion in China, especially based on Yang's own theory of the so-called "religious market", with speculations were based on a report of the Pew Research Center, another publication backed by the foundation. Some scholars of Chinese religion have criticized Yang's sociological theories about religion in China, although the New York Times has referred to Yang as "a pioneer in the study of the sociology of religion in China", and the Wall Street Journal has deemed him a "leading scholar on Chinese church-society relation".

=== Psychology ===

==== Positive psychology, religion and medicine ====
Harold G. Koenig, Dale Mathews, David Larson, Jeffrey Levin, Herbert Benson and Michael McCullough are scholars to whom the foundation has provided funds to "report the positive relations" between religion and medicine. One field in which the foundation has been particularly supportive is positive psychology, as developed by Martin Seligman, Angela Duckworth and others. Positive psychology is "the scientific study of  what makes life most worth living", or "the scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing on multiple levels that include the biological, personal, relational, institutional, cultural, and global dimensions of life". Positive psychology is concerned with eudaimonia, "the good life", reflection about what holds the greatest value in life – the factors that contribute the most to a well-lived and fulfilling life. Positive psychology began as a new domain of psychology in 1998 when Seligman chose it as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association.