Both sides of the table

I started on the industry side, and not in a glamorous corner of it. In 1986 I joined the Wackenhut Corporation’s world headquarters, managing investigations; from there I moved to Business Risks International, selling specialized investigations and security consulting to Fortune 500 companies in pharmaceuticals, finance, manufacturing, and retail. It was an education no business school offers: how large companies actually decide, who signs, who blocks, and what an outsider has to prove before anyone trusts him.

In 1993 I joined LexisNexis as an account manager, working with large law firms and corporations just as legal and business research moved online. Over six years I grew market share and revenue in online databases, application software, and internet publishing tools — through a platform shift that rewrote how an entire profession worked. Selling through that shift taught me the difference between a customer and a partner: customers buy a product; partners bet on where you are going.

Project MUSE brought me to the academy’s side of the table in 1999. At Johns Hopkins University and its university press, I ran the operation — strategic planning, partner recruitment, sales and marketing, day-to-day management — of an online publishing collaboration of twenty-five universities, university presses, and scholarly associations, serving subscribing institutions around the world. It was my first time building revenue inside a university, and my first clear sight of a truth that has held ever since: the academy holds extraordinary assets and, too often, no coherent way to offer them.

In 2001 I moved to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where the job was to put some of the world’s most capable computing in front of the private sector — largely Fortune 500 companies — and to move NCSA-born technologies out into the market, work that produced two startups during my term. I authored the economic-development case in NCSA’s proposal for Blue Waters, the petascale supercomputer NSF funded in 2007. The campus later asked me to direct IT and economic development for the university as a whole — fifteen years, all told, of learning how a public research university creates value beyond its walls.

Along the way I co-founded a company of my own. WayMark Analytics grew out of NSF-funded research on stakeholder alignment and came to market through the NSF I-Corps program; as co-founder and chief operations officer from 2013 to 2020, I helped organizations in the United States and abroad map the stakeholders and interests in large, complicated, multi-party projects — the kind where misreading one constituency can stall the whole effort. Founding a company from university research taught me the commercialization path from the inside.

Carnegie Mellon recruited me in 2016, and the role grew with the results — by 2020 the university had combined two associate-vice-president positions into one seat reporting to both the Vice President for Research and the Vice President for University Advancement. We convened the university’s asset teams to plan and present one voice to corporate partners. Georgia Tech then hired me in 2022 as its founding Associate Vice President of Corporate Engagement, with a clean-sheet mandate: close two legacy offices, build one holistic organization, and grow. Georgia Tech came to call the model a blueprint for the 21st-century university, and leaders from campuses across the country sought out the office to study it. In 2026 I stepped down to bring the model to other institutions.