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New endowed chair shows UAB’s commitment to Birmingham economy, startup ecosystem

  • June 11, 2018
Leader in entrepreneurship academia joins UAB’s Collat School of Business as inaugural Goodrich Endowed Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

patrick murphy streamCollaboration, innovation and entrepreneurial synergy remain top-of-mind for the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Patrick J. Murphy, Ph.D., has been tapped as the inaugural Goodrich Endowed Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Collat School of Business.

“Hiring Dr. Murphy reinforces UAB’s commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Eric Jack, dean of the Collat School of Business. “The Goodrich endowed chair will bring credibility, cross-disciplinary collaborations and the horsepower to significantly enhance our academic and experiential programs, to help innovate Birmingham.”

Murphy has been an entrepreneurship professor for more than 15 years and is well-versed in cutting-edge entrepreneurship training and the enhancement of entrepreneurship education through outreach to entrepreneurial ventures, community engagement and program development. His long list of entrepreneurship research publications includes multiple studies of technology ventures and social enterprises. He also wrote a scholarly book about historic mutinies on seafaring ventures facing radical uncertainty during the Age of Discovery, which was published by Yale University Press.

Learn more about donating to entrepreneurial efforts within the UAB Collat School of Business.

As professor of management and entrepreneurship in the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University in Chicago, Murphy envisioned and launched a range of ecosystem-oriented entrepreneurship programs. A multiple-award-winning teacher and researcher, he has international entrepreneurship education experience in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and New Zealand and throughout Europe. Since 2015, Murphy has served as editor of the scholarly journal Management Decision. In 2016, AmericanInno named Murphy to Chicago’s “50 on Fire” for his impact on the Chicago entrepreneurial ecosystem. In 2017, Chicago-based Future Founders selected him as the inaugural “Entrepreneurship Professor of the Year” across all Illinois colleges and universities.

“I am very excited to join the world-class team at UAB and lead the academic entrepreneurship program,” Murphy said. “Our team is going to build and launch high-impact initiatives, serve aspiring student entrepreneurs and work with faculty members across the university, and support Birmingham's amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

Prior to academia, Murphy worked for a French multinational company and served in the United States Navy, where he was a certified harbor tugboat chief engineer at 19 years of age.

The Goodrich Endowed Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship was established in 2017 by Mike and Gillian Goodrich to support education and research in innovation and entrepreneurship at the Collat School of Business.