Organization Leadership

John E. Cox, Jr. is the President and founder of The Communications Institute. He founded the organization in 2003 in Los Angeles. TCI was formed with the help of leaders and scholars from such academic institutions as Caltech, RAND Corporation, University of Southern California, and the Kennedy School at Harvard. Representatives from these institutions all served on the founding board of trustees. 

In his role as president of The Communications Institute he has coordinated numerous research studies and educational symposiums held in such locations as the United States Capitol, state capitols and on the campuses of major universities.  His work has attracted bipartisan support and involvement. 

Mr. Cox also served for 27 years as President and Founder of the Foundation for American Communications (FACS), which was the nation’s largest organization providing education for journalists in economics, science, and law. 

FACS worked closely with the media including specialized training provided for many national media organizations including NBC News, CNN, the New York Times Company, ABC, the Gannett Company, and Scripps Howard Newspapers. FACS sponsored great programs like its Caltech Science Institute for Journalists. 

More than 20,000 journalists attended FACS educational programs, conferences and weeklong Economics Institute sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

FACS also conducted indepth analysis of the problems with the knowledge of journalists which are even truer today. The foundation was headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City. 

Mr. Cox also oversaw the development of FACSNET, the first content website for journalists, created at the dawn of the internet working with the NSF San Diego Supercomputer Center. 

Prior to founding FACS, he was Chief of Staff in the United States Congress for Congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr and a California State Senator. He was a San Francisco Bay Area broadcast journalist. 

He is a native of California and a graduate of San Jose State University in journalism. He now lives in northern California and has been active in land use and conservation activities. 

   Kevin R. Hopkins has served  the Research Director of TCI since 2011. He is an economics and public policy analyst. His focus throughout his career has been on finding ways to make environmental protection and economic well-being compatible rather than competing goals.

Mr. Hopkins was coauthor of several TCI Studies including both Powering California Studies. 

 A trained economist, he served in The White House as Special Assistant to the President for Policy Development, staff director for the President’s Cabinet Council on Economic Affairs, and Director of the White House Office of Policy Information. In these roles, among other duties, he was responsible for helping to devise and communicate the nation’s economic, energy, and environmental policy in a way that promoted a union of economic and environmental goals.  

Subsequently, Mr. Hopkins was appointed senior communications and policy counsel to the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, where his portfolio included alternative energy development, energy efficiency, and environmental protection.

 For the past 19 years, he has been a senior contributing editor to Business Week magazine, the world’s leading business publication, and has written widely on economic, energy, and environmental issues. He also was a senior policy advisor to the Mayor of San Diego, at the time America’s sixth largest city, where he focused on economic, energy, and environmental matters, and he was senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a world- renowned public policy research center.   

Kurt Rayners serves as the corporate secretary and management consultant. Kurt provides those services to TCI while serving as President of his own corporation, Residual Consulting based in Carlsbad, California. 

He holds an MBA from California State University in Northridge and a second from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was formerly an executive at the Walt Disney Company in Burbank.