Meet the Director
Dr. Jeffrey R. Cornwall, The Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship
Dr. Jeff Cornwall, a veteran business professor, author of books on entrepreneurship and co-founder and former CEO of a fast-growing health care company in Raleigh, N.C., is the inaugural Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship and Director for the Center for Entrepreneurship at Belmont University. Previously, he was the Sandra Schulze Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Cornwall earned a D.B.A. and a M.B.A from the University of Kentucky, and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. In the late 1980's, he left academics to become the Co-founder and President/CEO of Atlantic Behavioral Health Systems, headquartered in Raleigh, NC. His company operated a variety of health care facilities and programs and employed over 300 people. After nine years of rapid growth, and negotiating the sale of most of the corporations' business interests he returned to academics.
Dr. Cornwall consults with a variety of businesses on start-up and growth related issues.
His current research and teaching interests include entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics. He authored or co-authored six books, Bringing Your Business to Life, Bootstrapping, Organizational Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Financial Management, The Entrepreneurial Educator, and From the Group Up: Entrepreneurial School Leadership.
In May 2005, Belmont University's Entrepreneurship Program was ranked a Top 10 Entrepreneurship Emphasis Program by Entrepreneur magazine for the second straight year. In 2006, Dr. Cornwall was named a Fellow of the United States Association for Smal Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE). In 2008, Belmont University's Center for Entrepreneurship received the USASBE National Model Undergraduate Program of the Year Award.
My interest in entrepreneurship came early in life. I grew up with entrepreneurship and small business as topics around the dinner table at night. My family was involved in many ventures. My father left a career in corporate America to pursue an entrepreneurial career in the mid-1970s. Today my father is an active, octogenarian entrepreneur. I was fortunate to be able to be involved in many of my father's entrepreneurial endeavors from an early age. That is where I caught the entrepreneurial bug that I carried forward in my own career as an entrepreneur.
His web log site, The Entrepreneurial Mind, is one of the most popular small business blogs on the web. It was named by Forbes as a "Best of the Web" and is part of the Forbes blog network. His blog is also linked to by Entrepreneur, Inc., and US News and World Report. Click here for The Entrepreneurial Mind , a Web log by Dr. Jeff Cornwall, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship.
