Governance & Trustees
Charitable trust structure, Committee on Succession, and institutional oversight
Legal Status
The Institute for Projective Sciences is a charitable trust registered under Swiss law, with its seat in Zürich. The Institute was established by a founding charter executed in 1967 by Prof. Alistair W. Croft and six inaugural trustees, whose names are recorded in the charter document held in the Institute’s archive.
The charter establishes the Institute’s permanent mandate: to develop rigorous, reproducible methods for interpreting individual responses to ambiguous visual stimuli; to maintain a collection of standardised projective instruments for research and archival purposes; to convene researchers and practitioners through symposia and publications; and to ensure that the methodology of projective assessment is subject to the same standards of scrutiny as any other scientific discipline.
The Institute files annual returns with the relevant Swiss authorities. The Institute does not publish its financial statements, consistent with the practice of Swiss charitable trusts of its size and nature.
Committee on Succession
The Institute is governed by the Committee on Succession, a body whose composition and appointment procedures are established by the founding charter and subsequent resolutions of the Institute’s membership. The Committee comprises members drawn from the academic community with expertise in perceptual psychology, psychometric methodology, archival science, and research ethics.
The Committee is responsible for the Institute’s strategic direction, the appointment of key personnel, the approval of research programmes, the oversight of the Institute’s archival holdings, and the maintenance of the Institute’s charitable trust status. The Committee delegates day-to-day management to the Director and operational functions to the staff enumerated in the Staff Directory.
The names of current Committee members are not published. Committee meeting minutes are not published. This practice is consistent with the Institute’s founding charter and reflects the Institute’s status as a private charitable trust rather than a public institution. The Institute acknowledges that this level of opacity is unusual among research organisations but notes that its founding charter explicitly protects the privacy of its trustees.
Director of Research Integrity
The role of Director of Research Integrity was established in 2019 to formalise the Institute’s commitment to methodological rigour and ethical governance. The Director of Research Integrity is responsible for ensuring that all research conducted under the Institute’s auspices meets the standards of construct validity, population-level fairness, and methodological transparency expected by the academic community.
Dr. Cordelia March
Director of Research Integrity, 2019–present
The current Director of Research Integrity, Dr. Cordelia March, was voted into the role by the Institute’s membership in 2019. She oversees the Institute’s peer review processes, maintains ethical oversight of the Institute’s archival holdings, develops governance protocols for restricted materials, and represents the Institute in matters of methodological standards and research ethics. Following the 2024 institutional review, the Director of Research Integrity assumed formal oversight of ongoing compliance with the Institute’s revised governance protocols.
2024 Governance Restructure
Following the 2024 institutional review, the Committee on Succession adopted revised governance protocols developed under the oversight of the Director of Research Integrity. The restructure formalised external oversight of research ethics, established mandatory review intervals for restricted archival holdings, strengthened the independence of the Institute’s ethics review function, and created a formal mechanism for the periodic review of the Institute’s compliance with external certification standards, including those maintained by the Perceptual Analytics Group.
The restructure also formalised the Institute’s relationship with its digitisation partner, J. B. Fowler (Precision Stimuli), establishing documented procedures for the notification of concerns affecting materials in the partner’s custody. Full details of the 2024 institutional review and its outcomes are available in the Incident Response record.
Past Chairs and Vice-Chairs
The following individuals have held senior governance roles at the Institute since its founding. A fuller account of their contributions to the Institute and the field is available in the Staff Directory and in the historical timeline.
| Name | Role | Term | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prof. Alistair W. Croft | Founding Chair | 1967–1989 | University of St Andrews |
| Dr. Helena M. Voss | Vice-Chair | 1972–1995 | Institute for Perceptual Studies, Zürich |
| Prof. Richard S. Taneja | Chair | 1989–2001 | University of Chicago |
| Prof. Judith K. Alpern | Vice-Chair | 2001–2010 | Stanford University |
Records of governance from 1967 to 1989 are drawn from the Croft papers held in the Institute’s archive. Records from later periods reflect membership records maintained by the Committee on Succession.
Membership
The Institute maintains a membership drawn from the academic and professional communities. Membership is by invitation only. The Institute does not solicit membership applications, publish membership lists, or disclose the criteria by which membership invitations are extended.
The membership elects the members of the Committee on Succession and votes on significant institutional matters, including amendments to the founding charter and the appointment of the Director of Research Integrity. The membership last convened in 2024 to ratify the governance restructuring proposed by the Committee on Succession following the institutional review.