John W. Murphy is the President and CEO of the Flinn Foundation, one of Arizona’s largest private grant-making foundations. As the Foundation’s first professional CEO, he has been responsible for guiding the growth of the $160-million foundation, which specializes in the biosciences in Arizona. Most recently, Mr. Murphy served as a member of the Governor’s Task Force charged with planning the tri-university Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), and now serves on its board of directors.

As the Foundation’s CEO he also directs the Flinn Scholars Program, an innovative college scholarship program for gifted Arizona high school students, and an initiative in support of Arizona’s principal arts organizations.

Mr. Murphy is a native of West Virginia and holds the M.A. degree in mass communications from the University of Iowa. Prior to entering the foundation field, he held administrative positions with three different universities. He joined the Flinn Foundation in 1981 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J., the nation’s largest health philanthropy, where he directed various management and grant programs.

He previously chaired the board of Grantmakers in Health, the national organization for corporate and private foundation donors in the healthcare field, and is past president of the Conference of Southwest Foundations, a six-state regional association of grant-making foundations. In 1999, Mr. Murphy received the Terrance Keenan Award from Grantmakers in Health, the highest professional recognition in the field, in recognition of his leadership and creative contributions to philanthropy.