Leadership

Dr. Edwin J. Feulner is the Chairman Emeritus of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and recipient of the Foundation’s Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom in 2006. He is also Founder and former President of The Heritage Foundation. Over the course of his career, Feulner has served as an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an aide to Representative Melvin Laird (R-WI) when Laird was Chairman of the House Republican Conference and later, when he was U.S. Secretary of Defense, as Chief of Staff to Congressman Phil Crane (R-IL), and as the Executive Director of the Republican Study Committee. Feulner assumed the presidency of The Heritage Foundation in 1977, transforming it from a small think tank with nine employees to a highly influential research and policy institution of over two hundred and fifty. Feulner has also held leadership positions in a wide array of academic, political, and economic non-profit organizations and universities, and served on the Gingrich-Mitchell Congressional UN Reform Task Force and the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, of which he was Chairman. He served as the Public Member (Ambassador) of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament. In 2022, Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia appointed Dr. Feulner Chairman of the Virginia Commission on Higher Education Board Appointments. Feulner has written eight books, including The American Spirit and Getting America Right. He holds a B.A. from Regis University, an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh.