Sloan Foundation Leader Paul Joskow to Retire Next Year

Paul Joskow will retire as president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at the end of 2017 after leading one of the nation’s largest grant makers for a decade, the foundation announced Tuesday.

Mr. Joskow, an economist, will return to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served on the faculty for 37 years.

At Sloan, which has about $1.8 billion in assets, Mr. Joskow attempted to change the way foundations approach science. Instead of supporting applied research, like the development of medical devices and novel drugs, he steered the bulk of Sloan’s support toward basic scientific inquiry.

Mr. Joskow, a Brooklyn-born author of six books, pushed to create the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a group of grant makers that advises donors on how to best support scientific inquiry. The group has set a goal of raising an additional $1 billion a year for basic research by 2020.

The foundation plans to announce a search committee for a new president in January.