FACULTY
SPOTLIGHT
JEFF WHALEN | TEACHING FACULTY I | STEM & COMMERCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Can you briefly tell us a little about your background?
What are some of your favorite things to do in your spare time? Adventuring with friends and family, enjoying great food and fixing broken things.
What is your favorite part of working for the Jim Moran College ? My favorite part of working for JMC is that I get to collaborate with amazing people on the administration, faculty, staff and students.
What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs? So much I could say here but I would have to recite everything I talk to my students about in my classes. If I were to try to sum it all up and reflect on what I really think would be my opinion on the best single piece of advice for an aspiring entrepreneur, it would be to be disciplined in your venture creation journey. Don’t accept validation for your business concept that isn’t the most pure and equivocal form of validation in the universe, the pre-sale. So many new ventures fail because the founders believe they have something great to offer, but the problem is just that, it’s only those founders that think it’s great and their customer (the actual person they need to be focusing on the determine if it’s great or not) never got to provide them with their validation of the offering before it was brought to market. If we can maintain an ultra-high level of discipline in what guides our entrepreneurial decisions, we can remove risk from our efforts in ways that success or failure is no longer dependent on luck, fate or deceiving other people. Success can be determined instead by a systematic approach with a positive attitude and a boat load of entrepreneurial discipline.
Technically I’m a scientist. I moved from Davie, FL to Tallahassee, FL in 2001 to pursue a medical profession at Florida State University, but quickly realized I wanted to change paths and received my BS in biochemistry in 2005 followed by my PhD in inorganic chemistry in 2009 (both from FSU). After graduate school I joined the National High Magnetic Field Lab (MagLab as we call it) in Tallahassee, FL as a postdoctoral and in 2012 joined the MagLab research faculty where I served as principal investigator on US Dept. of Energy and US Dept. of Defense sponsored research projects in new solid-state materials and electromagnet systems development. Really though my passion has always been fishing and you can find me most sunny weekends with my wife and two children offshore in the northern Gulf of Mexico hunting grouper, snapper, scallops and adventures in general. Second to fishing I focus heavily on innovation and commercialization. I have several issued patents and many peer-reviewed publications, and have commercialized my innovations in multiple FSU spin out companies. I made the switch and joined the teaching faculty full-time at the Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship in 2019 as the STEM Entrepreneur in Residence where I have developed and instruct a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses at JMC. I am the director for the undergraduate bachelor’s program for STEM Entrepreneurship where we teach courses such as Enough To Be Dangerous, The Entrepreneur’s Perspective on a Survey of STEM, Data Science Entrepreneurship, Healthcare Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneurship in Contemporary Society, I also teach the Colloquium and Prototyping courses in our graduate Product Development master’s program and serve on various JMC and FSU committees. I am a member of the Leon County Magnetic Task Force and the Director of Magnetics Corporation.
INNOLENEWS
|
06
