Charles T. Tart is a psychologist and parapsychologist known as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology. He is a Core Faculty member of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and ushered transpersonal psychology into modern psychology.

Tart studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before electing to become a psychologist. He received his doctoral degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963, and then received postdoctoral training in hypnosis research with Professor Ernest R. Hilgard at Stanford University. He is currently a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (Palo Alto, California) and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (Sausalito, California), as well as Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California, where he served for 28 years. Tart was the first holder of the Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas and has served as a Visiting Professor in East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, as an Instructor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Virginia, and a consultant on government funded parapsychological research at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International).

In addition to his seminal books Altered States of Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychologies, Tart has published on a variety of psychological topics with books like On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication, States of Consciousness (1975), and Symposium on Consciousness. His 1997 book Body Mind Spirit: Exploring the Parapsychology of Spirituality, examines the relationship between parapsychological abilities and our spiritual nature, and was the March 1998 best metaphysical book selection of Amazon.com. His most recent books are Mind Science: Meditation Training for Practical People and The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together. He has had more than 250 articles published in professional journals and books, including lead articles in such prestigious scientific journals as Science and Nature.