Professor Gerald Fine to Step Down as Executive Director of Innovate@BU; Formation of the Executive Director Search Advisory Committee
From Dr. Jean Morrison, University Provost and Chief Academic Officer
Gerald Fine, Professor of the Practice of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering, Executive Director of Innovate@BU, and Director of the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC), has announced that he plans to step down from his leadership role and retire from the University.
Professor Fine has been among our most respected innovators on faculty since joining BU in 2012 after a 30-year career as a leader in private industry. His goal upon arriving at BU was singular: to help train engineers with foundational skills for long-term career impact. It was this drive to help students transition from computer-based theoretical design to the hands-on work of using real design equipment and materials in a laboratory that in 2014 inspired the launch of EPIC, now one of the nation’s premier university design spaces. In 2016, his work through EPIC was recognized with the University’s Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology.
The following year, Professor Fine was named the inaugural executive director of Innovate@BU, a state-of-the-art laboratory and training ground for future entrepreneurs on the BU campus. Over the last four years, Innovate@BU and its BUild Lab IDG Capital Student Innovation Center have become a hub of entrepreneurial activity, connecting some of BU’s most talented students with leaders from Boston’s vibrant business ecosystem and enabling them to translate their ideas into tomorrow’s business and societal solutions.
Professor Fine has been at the fore of all of this, as a teacher, a strategic coach, and a collaboration-builder. He has taken the experience and success he’d had leading major corporations, including Corning and SCHOTT North America, and created a model for experiential learning that prepares aspiring engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs for a lifetime of rigorous examination and exploration. It is a model that will be with BU for a long time to come, and we are grateful to Professor Fine for his service and many contributions.
We will conduct a search to identify a new executive director for Innovate@BU. This search, in addition to recruiting a key new member for University-wide leadership, presents a pivotal opportunity for BU to leverage the outstanding work being accomplished through this initiative and to identify emerging trends, create new collaborations with industry and public partners, and chart exciting new directions for innovation and entrepreneurial growth. I have appointed a small search advisory committee to assist with this process. Its membership is listed below.
Please join me in thanking Professor Fine for his service and many contributions to Boston University and to the College of Engineering, EPIC, and Innovate@BU. I will share more information about the search process in the months ahead, and appreciate your support of this important effort.
Innovate@BU Executive Director Search Advisory Committee
Chair:
Laura Jenks, Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives and Chief of Staff, Office of the Provost
Members:
David Carballo, Assistant Provost for General Education; Professor of Archaeology,
Anthropology, and Latin American Studies, College of Arts & Sciences
Iain Cockburn, Richard C. Shipley Professor in Management; Professor and Chair of Strategy and Innovation, Questrom School of Business
Kenneth Lutchen, Dean and Professor of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering
Gregory Stoller, Senior Lecturer of Strategy and Innovation, Questrom School of Business
Emily Whiting, Associate Professor of Computer Science, College of Arts & Sciences