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 Edwin John Feulner Jr. was born in Chicago, Illinois, 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 Immaculate Conception High School (Elmhurst, Illinois) and graduated from Regis University with a bachelor's degree in English in 1963. After receiving an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1964, he attended Georgetown University and the London School of Economics, where he was a Richard M. Weaver Fellow. He put his studies on hold while President of The Heritage Foundation. Later, in 1981 he earned a PhD in political science at the University of Edinburgh presenting the thesis 'The evolution of the Republican Study Committee'. Career Feulner began his career as an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then called the Center for Strategic Studies. He later became a congressional aide to Congressman Melvin Laird. Feulner subsequently became a long-serving executive assistant to Illinois Republican congressman Phil Crane. Prior to his presidency of the Heritage Foundation, Feulner was executive director of the Republican Study Committee. Heritage Foundation Feulner was a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation from 1973 until 1977, when he left Representative Crane's office to run the outfit full-time. It had nine employees and in those four years had churned through four presidents. As president, he changed the foundation's direction. He wanted it to be more aggressive, more market-driven and less ivory-tower, creating easily-accessed, concise studies. By focusing the foundation's marketing, he transformed it from a small operation into a booming enterprise of conservative ideals, eventually creating the think tank that Newt Gingrich, in a New York Times column, called "the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis." This new marketing strategy was called the "briefcase test", a concept that revolutionized the influence of think tanks on public policy