Dan Murphy
Executive Director, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government
Dan Murphy is executive director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he advances the Center’s mission “to advance the state of knowledge and policy analysis concerning some of society’s most challenging problems at the interface of the public and private sectors.”
Before joining M-RCBG, Dan served for nearly five years as executive director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Harvard China Fund, two of the world’s leading research centers on China. During his tenure, he reinvigorated programming and stakeholder engagement, hosted numerous delegations from China, and played a central role in a signature fundraising effort that left both units on strong financial footing. In 2019, he joined the Harvard delegation that accompanied President Larry Bacow to Greater China for meetings with academic partners and government officials.
Previously, Dan was the inaugural program director of Yale Center Beijing, where he collaborated with Yale faculty and deans as well as Chinese partners to design programming at the university’s Beijing facility. From 2008 to 2014, he worked at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, ultimately as director of special initiatives. There, he expanded the Public Intellectuals Program, which connects America’s next generation of leading China scholars with policymakers and the media; led delegations of senior Congressional staff to China; and secured significant public and private grant funding for innovative programming.
Dan’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Wire China, ChinaFile, U.S. News & World Report, The Conversation, the journal International Higher Education, and in publications from the Policy Institute at King’s College London and Harvard University Press. He has been quoted in outlets including the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Foreign Policy. He has spoken at universities and institutions in the United States, Asia, and Europe, including the Council on Foreign Relations, Kyoto University, Fudan University, Tsinghua University, the Max Planck Institute, and Sciences Po.
He received a full scholarship for graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University–Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, where he focused on politics. He also holds an M.A. in Chinese Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a B.A. in English and Chinese Language and Literature from Connecticut College. In 2001, he was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship.
Dan is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and serves on the board of the University Forum, an academic exchange platform that uses Mandarin—a language in which he is fluent—as the medium for dialogue.