Barnaby Marsh, D.Phil

Director | Barnaby/Barnaby

Dr. Barnaby Marsh is a member of the CMBM Board of Directors

Barnaby is the co-founder of Saint Partners, a philanthropy services company that helps the world’s most dedicated philanthropists channel their wealth, influence and desire for meaning towards social good. He is regarded as one of the world’s most original philanthropy strategists, known for his skill in structuring projects to generate cascades of downstream results and engagement, including strategic follow-up funding. Since 2002, Barnaby has advised on over 200 philanthropic projects at academic and cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian, Royal Society, Santa Fe Institute, 92nd Y, CalTech, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, Oxford, and many others. Barnaby has also advised many of the world’s most generous individuals on their private foundations. For many years, he worked with the late investing pioneer Sir John Templeton to develop novel approaches to philanthropy, including competition-based methods and prizes, and was a key early leader in the development of the $3.5 billion John Templeton Foundation.

Barnaby’s technical background is in decision sciences, complexity, and risk. He has held postdoctoral academic appointments at Oxford, Harvard, the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 2018, he co-authored the popular book, How Luck Happens (Dutton Penguin Random House), that has since been translated into 6 languages. Barnaby grew up in the Alaskan wilderness and was mostly self-taught before college. He holds an AB Summa cum laude from Cornell University, where he was a College Scholar, and a doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Based in New York City, he currently serves several national organizations as a board member or consulting advisor, including Revive and Restore, Children and Screens, Solutions Journalism Network, the Center for Mind Body Medicine, the United States Office of American Possibilities, and Ashoka.