Edwin Feulner

Edwin John Feulner Jr. (born August 12, 1941) is a former think tank executive who founded the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation and served as its president from 1977 to 2013 and again from 2017 to 2018. Feulner's positions have included advisor and chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, from which he received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom in 2006. Early years and education Feulner was born in Chicago, Illinois on August 12, 1941, to Helen Joan (née Franzen) and Edwin John Feulner, the owner of a Chicago real estate firm. He has three sisters: Mary Ann, Joan, and Barbara. The family comes from a line of devout Roman Catholic German Americans. Three of his maternal uncles were parish priests. Feulner attended Immacultate Conception High School in Elmhurst, Illinois and Regis University, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1963. He attended the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received an MBA in 1964. He was a Richard M. Weaver Fellow at Georgetown University and the London School of Economics. Later, in 1981, he received a PhD in political science from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where his doctoral thesis, "The evolution of the Republican Study Committee", was on the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.