Jim Pope Fellowship’s History
In 2020, the James G. and Dee H. Pope Faculty Fellows Endowment Fund was established. The goal of the fellowship was to support faculty to integrate entrepreneurship in their curriculum and mentor students aspiring to be entrepreneurs through the CREATE-X program, the Georgia Institute of Technology's entrepreneurial learning incubator.
Jim Pope Faculty Fellow appointments last one year and include discretionary funding to be spent on resources to support entrepreneurial courses and research. Applications are accepted each summer and open to all Georgia Tech faculty members.
This fellowship is possible through the generous gift of Jim Pope, retired president and CEO of Hazlehurst & Associates, Inc. an actuarial and consulting firm. His vision is rooted in the belief that students must develop an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset to excel in the workforce.
Through the fellowship, CREATE-X has been able to further its mission of instilling entrepreneurial confidence. Faculty members are inspired to build strong bridges between their academic units and CREATE-X, sparking entrepreneurial confidence in the classroom while developing their own as educators.
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Entrepreneurial tools, curricular options, co-curricular opportunities, and career development
Majors and professional development programs
Existing courses and a new maker space
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Examples of faculty success
- Kelly Griendling, a lecturer at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering (AE), incorporated entrepreneurial assignments into her aerospace engineering courses, leading to a significant increase in entrepreneurship elements throughout AE.
- Olufisayo Omojokun, director of the Division of Computing(DCI) in the College of Computing (CoC), has empowered faculty to employ entrepreneurial activities in their teaching. The DCI is home to the CoC lecturer-track faculty and each semester the DCI teaches thousands of students across the Institute. Omojokun has been able to give these faculty the opportunity to use entrepreneurial activities for career advancement. Omojokun consistently impacts more than 400 students each year with a CREATE-X module in CS1331.
- Nian Liu, Associate Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, actively encouraged students in his class to launch a project through Startup Launch.
- Lauren K. Stewart, Williams Family Associate Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), received the James G. Pope Faculty Fellowship in 2021. As part of the program, she has secured more than $1M in funding and space for new makerspaces that will promote creativity and entrepreneurship for CEE students, faculty, and staff. Stewart has also implemented entrepreneurially minded assignments and activities into the five courses she teaches in the School. The assignments and activities have also been adopted by other AE instructors. By combining efforts with other existing programs, at least 25% of all AE courses now have an entrepreneurial element
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