Joseph Bast is president and CEO of The Heartland Institute, a national nonprofit research center founded in 1984 and located in Chicago, Illinois. According to a recent telephone survey, among state elected officials The Heartland Institute is among the nation’s best-known and most highly regarded “think tanks.”

Bast is the coauthor of 12 books, including Rebuilding America's Schools (1990), Why We Spend Too Much on Health Care (1992), Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism (1994), and Education & Capitalism (2003). His writing has appeared in Phi Delta Kappan, Economics of Education Review, Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The Cato Journal, USA Today, and many of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers.

Bast is publisher of five monthly newspapers with a combined circulation of nearly 200,000 copies. Those publications are titled School Reform News, Environment & Climate News, Health Care News, Budget & Tax News, and Infotech & Telecom News.

Bast has been recognized for his contributions to public policy research and debate, including being named one of “The 88 to Watch in 1988” by the Chicago Tribune; recipient of the 1994 Roe Award from State Policy Network; commissioned a Kentucky Colonel by Gov. Paul E. Patton on June 19, 1996; corecipient of the 1996 Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award; recipient of the 1998 Eagle Award from Eagle Forum; and recipient of the 2004 Champion of Liberty award from the Libertarian National Committee. He was elected a member of the Philadelphia Society in 2002 and elected to the board of directors of the American Conservative Union in 2007.

Prior to being hired as The Heartland Institute’s first employee in 1984, Bast was coeditor of the bimonthly magazine Nomos and studied economics as an undergraduate at The University of Chicago.