Biography
He holds 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 has held faculty positions at Lehigh University, Physics Department, the California Institute of Technology, and, since 1962, at Princeton.
During his career, he 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.
He also studied psychic and parapsychological phenomena for many years.
With Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab in 1979 following an undergraduate project to study low-level psychokinetic effects on electronic random event generators. Over the last 25 years and more, Jahn and Dunne claim to have created a wealth of small-physical-scale, statistically significant results that suggest direct causal relationships between subjects' intention and otherwise random results.
Experiments under Jahn's purview also came to deal with Remote Viewing (RV) and other parapsychological matters. He has published more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Statistical flaws were proposed by others in the parapsychological community regarding some results in a few specific experiments.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has been chairman of the AIAA Electric Propulsion Technical Committee, associate editor of the AIAA Journal, and a member of the NASA Space Science and Technology Advisory Committee|Space Science and Technology Advisory Committee. He is vice President of the Society for Scientific Exploration and Chairman of the Board of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories consortium. He has been a long-term member of the Board of Directors of Hercules, Inc. and chairman of its Technology Committee, and a member and chairman of the Board of Trustees of Associated Universities, Inc. He has received the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award of the American Society for Engineering Education and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Andhra University.
He has authored two textbooks, Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (with B.J. Dunne) and Physics of Electric Propulsion, as well as several hundred publications in various technical fields.
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