John E. Sawyer

As president of the Mellon Foundation, John E. Sawyer oversaw an almost doubling of our total annual grantmaking. In addition to continuing the Foundation's support of humanistic scholarship and institutions of higher education, he promoted the improvement and modernization of the nation's research libraries and provided key leadership in the fields of population studies and ecology.

Previously, Mr. Sawyer was the president of William College, where he oversaw major changes in the college's structure and character, including its transition to coeducation, the elimination of its fraternities, and the provision of greater access for minority and economically less advantaged students. He began his career teaching economics at Harvard and Yale.

In 1994, in recognition of Mr. Sawyer's long-standing interests in multidisciplinary inquiry, Mellon launched the Sawyer Seminars, designed to promote comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.