William G. Bowen has been president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 1988. Before this, he was President of Princeton University, where he also served as Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. A graduate of Denison University (A.B. 1955) and Princeton University (Ph.D.1958), he joined the Princeton faculty in 1958 (specializing in labor economics) and served as Provost there from 1967-72.

Bowen joined the Foundation in 1988 and his tenure at Mellon has been marked by increases in the scale of the Foundation's activities, with annual appropriations now exceeding $180 million. Bowen's special interest in the application of information technology to scholarship has led to a range of initiatives including the Foundation-sponsored creation of JSTOR (a searchable electronic archive of the full runs of core journals in many fields), the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive, ARTstor (a repository of high-quality digitized works of art and related materials for teaching and research), and Ithaka Harbors, Inc. (a new organization launched to help accelerate the adoption of productive and efficient uses of information technology for the benefit of the worldwide higher education community).

Bowen is the author or co-author of 19 books, including Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (2003) with Sarah A. Levin; and The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values(2001) with James Shulman.