WILLIAM GRASSIE is an interdisciplinary scholar, nonprofit entrepreneur, social activist, author, and organizational consultant.
Grassie received a bachelor degree in political science from Middlebury College, and then worked for ten years on nuclear disarmament, citizen diplomacy, community organizing, and sustainability issues in Washington, D.C, Jerusalem, Philadelphia, and West Berlin. He studied comparative religion and philosophy of science at Temple University, and continued at Temple for five more years as an assistant professor in the Intellectual Heritage Program. He has held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Pendle Hill, and City College of New York. He has also served as a Senior Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Buddhist Studies at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy, Sri Lanka in 2007–2008.
He was the founding director of the Metanexus Institute, which promotes scientifically rigorous and philosophically open-ended exploration of foundational questions. Metanexus has worked with partners at some 400 universities in 45 countries, organized a dozen highly-acclaimed international conferences, and published an online journal—metanexus.net.
He is the author of The New Sciences of Religion: Exploring Spirituality from the Outside In and Bottom Up (2010) and a collection of essays, Politics by Other Means: Science and Religion in the 21st Century (2010).
