Robert George Jahn (April 1, 1930 – November 15, 2017) was an American plasma physicist, Professor of Aerospace Science, and Dean of Engineering at Princeton University. Jahn was also a founder of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR), a parapsychology research program which ran from 1979 to 2007. Career Jahn held a B.S.E. degree in Engineering Physics (1951), a M.A. Degree in Physics (1953), and a Ph.D. degree in Physics (1955), all from Princeton University, and held faculty positions in Physics Department at Lehigh University, at the California Institute of Technology, and, since 1962, at Princeton. During his career, Jahn worked on electrically powered spacecraft propulsion and directed several major research programs in advanced aerospace propulsion systems, in cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Air Force. In 1961, he founded the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton and directed it for more than three decades. He served as Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton from 1971 - 1986. Jahn was a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and was Chairman of its Electric Propulsion Technical Committee. He was a member of the NASA Space Science and Technology Advisory Committee and a member of the Board of Directors of Hercules Inc. from 1985 to 2001, where he served as Chairman of its Technology Committee. He also served on the Emergency Committee, the Nominating Committee, and the Social Responsibility Committee. He resigned from the Hercules Inc. board in 2001 at the age of 70. Jahn was the Chairman of the Elwing company which manufactures propulsion systems for satellites until his passing. Parapsychology Studies Jahn also engaged in the study of psychokinesis ("PK") for many years. With Brenda Dunne, he established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) in 1979 following an undergraduate project to study purported low-level psychokinetic effects on electronic random event generators. Over the years, Jahn and Dunne claim to have created a wealth of small-physical-scale, statistically significant results that they claim suggested direct causal relationships between subjects' intention and otherwise random results. Experiments under Jahn's purview also explored remote viewing and other topics in parapsychology. In 1982, at the invitation of the editors of Proceedings of the IEEE, Jahn published a comprehensive review of psychic phenomena from an engineering perspective. A subsequent critique of this review by psychologist Ray Hyman, which was also invited by the journal's editors,