Dr. Harold T. Shapiro, President Emeritus and Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, served as that institutions 18th president, from 1988 until June 2001. He came to Princeton after 24 years at the University of Michigan, where he served on the faculty and as president from 1980 to 1988.

Dr. Shapiro received a Bachelor’s Degree from McGill University in Montreal and, after five years in business, he enrolled in the Graduate School at Princeton, where he earned a Ph.D. in three years. His fields of special interest included econometrics, mathematical economics, science policy, and, more recently, bioethics.

A trustee of the Board of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, he also serves as the chair of the Board of Directors of DeVry, Inc, and is a director of The Hastings Center, Reading is Fundamental; Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics; Merck Vaccine Advisory Board; the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Princeton HealthCare Systems; and the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and is a member of the Board of Overseers of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He is also a member of Johnson & Johnson’s Advisory Committee on Stem Cell Initiatives, the National Academy of Science’s Committee on America’s Energy Future, the National Institute of Health’s Council of Councils, the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, the Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey Joint Board of Managers, and a member of the National Research Council’s Embryonic Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee. He is a Trustee of the American Jewish Committee and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He served as chair of the National Academies of Sciences Committee on the Organizational Structure of the National Institutes of Health from July 2002 to July 2003.

From 1996 to 2001, Dr. Shapiro served as chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which issued six major reports in the period 1996-2001. From 1990 to 1992, Dr. Shapiro served as a member and vice chair of President Bush’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Along with William G Bowen, his predecessor as president of Princeton, he edited Universities and Their Leadership, a compilation of papers presented at Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Conference on Higher Education in March 1996. His latest book, A Larger Sense of Purpose, is based on the 2003 Clark Kerr lectures.

He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the European Academy of Sciences, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and The American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Shapiro received the Council of Scientific Society Presidents 2000 Citation for Outstanding Leadership, the William D. Carey Lectureship Award for Leadership in Science Policy in 2006, and the Clark Kerr Award for Lifetime Achievement in Higher Education from the University of California Berkeley in 2009.

Dr. Shapiro was appointed to the UMDNJ Board of Trustees in June 2006.