Adam F. Falk is President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Prior to joining the Foundation in January 2018, Falk served as President of Williams College from 2010 through 2017. His accomplishments while at Williams include a deepened commitment to student body diversity and inclusion, increased attention to campus sustainability, and major investments in academic facilities, most significantly a new central library for the humanities and social sciences and a 180,000-square foot addition to the college’s science center. 

Falk came to Williams from the Johns Hopkins University, where he had been a member of the physics faculty since 1994. From 2006 to 2010, he served as the James B. Knapp Dean of the university’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, following service as Dean of the Faculty and Interim Dean.

A theoretical physicist whose research focused on elementary particle physics and quantum field theory, Falk is the author of more than 50 peer-reviewed papers covering a variety of topics, most particularly the interactions and decays of mesons and baryons containing heavy quarks. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and winner of the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award. Early in his career, he won national young investigator awards from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. In 1995, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics.

Falk graduated with a B.S. with Highest Distinction as a Morehead-Cain Scholar from the University of North Carolina in 1987 and earned his Ph.D. in 1991 from Harvard University. He held post-doctoral appointments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the University of California, San Diego.

Falk serves as a trustee of Mount Holyoke College, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, and the Quad Preparatory School. He is a past trustee of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Falk has served on the Physics Advisory Committee of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and on the Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded honorary degrees by Amherst College and Williams College, has received the University of North Carolina Distinguished Young Alumnus Award, and is an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford University.