PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In a letter to staff at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Harvey Fineberg, M.D., Ph.D., today announced his intention to step down as president of the foundation in late 2025 or early 2026, depending on when a successor is selected and prepared to take up the office.
He “loves the work we do together,” he wrote, but after serving ten years as president, he explained “this is the right moment to recruit a new president who can lead the foundation for the next decade or longer.”
“Harvey has been an outstanding president,” observed Kenneth Moore, chair of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Board of Trustees. “His unwavering commitment to excellence, coupled with a visionary mindset, enables him to synthesize complex ideas into a seamless tapestry of insight, transforming challenges into opportunities and inspiring those around him to elevate their own contributions. He will leave the foundation in a strong position for ever greater achievement in the years ahead.”
“I have been fortunate to work with many talented, dedicated, and principled people at the Moore Foundation and elsewhere,” Fineberg noted. “I will be ever grateful to Gordon Moore for inviting me to take up this position, to the entire Moore family for their continuing spirit of generosity, and to all trustees, past and present, who so ably served and serve the foundation.”
Next year, 2025, marks the 25th anniversary of grantmaking by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The board plans to initiate the search for Fineberg’s successor in the coming year.
Grantmaking impact
Under Fineberg’s leadership, the Moore Foundation’s Environmental Conservation Program extended its reach to market-based incentives alongside expanding place-based conservation programs in such critical regions as the Andes-Amazon, the Great Bear Sea in British Columbia, and the Arctic Ocean. The foundation supported many advances in sustainable fisheries, healthy ocean ecosystems, and marine conservation. The foundation enlarged its support for the conservation funding model called Project Finance for Permanence that brings together governments, communities, non-government organizations, and donors to provide comprehensive and enduring solutions, as in the Herencia Colombia (Heritage Colombia) initiative announced in 2022. The foundation accelerated application of natural capital approaches into development decisions and finance; served as a catalyst for global cooperation on nature-based solutions, and launched a major, new initiative on wildfire resilience.
During Fineberg’s tenure, the Science Program inaugurated an experimental physics investigator program to provide core support for leading investigators in the field and established the Moore Inventor Fellows to enable brilliant, prospective inventors to pursue their dreams. The foundation extended explorations in quantum physics and systems biology, exploring such interdisciplinary topics as aquatic symbiosis and the evolutionary origins of motility in micro-organisms; invested in astronomical exploration, observatories, instrumentation, and astrophysics; supported development of novel, biological imaging devices and sophisticated instruments for precise, physical measurement; helped establish big-data, discovery capacity at leading universities; fostered and reinforced open science; adopted a new initiative in green chemistry; strengthened and expanded programs to engage youth in science and to support citizen science; and promoted science in policy through state-based fellowship programs to place scientists in state legislatures and executive offices.
In preserving the special character of the Bay Area over the past decade, the Moore Foundation has made critical investments to protect undeveloped lands, natural ecosystems, and vital wildlife corridors. And the foundation is a generous supporter of Bay Area science and technology museums that provide exceptional educational opportunities for the public and spark excitement about science and technology in children of all ages.
In unique cross-cutting investments, the foundation funded renovation and expansion of key environmental research stations in the South Pacific and in South America; and supported exceptional, science-based conservation opportunities in the Galápagos Islands and eastern Pacific Ocean.
As a physician and public health leader, Fineberg helped ensure the legacy of the foundation’s historic contributions to nursing and the quality of health care, including through leadership programs based at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis and a highly consequential initiative on diagnostic excellence.
“I am proud of the many achievements by our grantees and grateful for the partnerships with sister foundations and so many others who make that success possible,” Fineberg wrote in his letter. “I want especially to thank my foundation colleagues in the infrastructure, investment management, and program teams, and those in the president’s office, who make work at the Moore Foundation a daily joy and inspiration.”
Leadership in science, health care and philanthropy
During the COVID pandemic, Fineberg’s fortuitous background in public health lent clarity to the foundation’s policies, and he simultaneously served as chair of the National Academies standing committee on emerging infectious diseases and 21st century health threats. In that role, Fineberg led in the production of more than 10 rapid expert consultations to assist government decision-making in the early months of the pandemic. During his tenure at the foundation, Fineberg chaired National Academies consensus committees on reproducibility and replicability in science and on a definition of long COVID.
Fineberg chaired the board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2013-2018) and served as a member (2009-2022). He serves as trustee of the CMB Foundation (China Medical Board), an offshoot of the Rockefeller Foundation, and will take up the role of board chair in 2025. He serves on the board of the Israel Institute for Advanced Study and on the editorial board of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Fineberg also serves on numerous advisory boards for domestic and international organizations, including the Peterson Center on Healthcare, the Veolia Environment Foresight Committee, the Aspen Health Strategy Group, the U.S. Comptroller General’s advisory board, the Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness in Public Health at Harvard, the Vanke School of Public Health at Tsinghua University in Beijing, the scientific advisory board of the Singapore National Research Foundation, the Mavri Program to accelerate biomedical innovation and train physician-scientists in Israel, the Stanford Digital Health Center, and the Center on Diagnostic Excellence at UCSF (University of California San Francisco). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, in addition to the National Academy of Medicine, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
As an extension of his leadership at the Moore Foundation, Fineberg chairs the board of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, now including more than three dozen philanthropies that support science and are dedicated to helping philanthropists new to science to make fully informed choices. The Alliance has also been instrumental in promoting the role of philanthropy in the U.S. research enterprise, symbolized by this year’s enlargement of the National Academies’ research roundtable to include philanthropy alongside government, universities, and industry.
Before joining the Moore Foundation, Fineberg served as president of the Institute of Medicine, where he engineered its conversion to the National Academy of Medicine. He helped found and served as president of the Society for Medical Decision Making. Fineberg previously served as provost of Harvard University and dean of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He served on the board of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and had taken up the role as chair before resigning to become president of the Moore Foundation.
About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Gordon and Betty Moore established the foundation to create positive outcomes for future generations. In pursuit of that vision, we advance scientific discovery, environmental conservation, and the special character of the San Francisco Bay Area.
