Steven C Currall

Steven C. Currall, Ph.D. is Executive Director and Associate Vice Provost for Academic-Corporate Initiatives. In alignment with Harvard’s academic mission, he is responsible for fostering University-wide coordination of corporate engagement activities that support research and innovation and build upon institutional strengths through sponsored research, gifts, and new types of agreements.  

Prior to Harvard, Currall served as president of the University of South Florida (USF).  He was provost and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist University.  At the University of California, Davis, Currall served as senior adviser to the chancellor for strategic projects and initiatives, and as dean of the Graduate School of Management. At University College London, he was the founding chair of the Department of Management Science and Innovation and Vice Dean of Enterprise in the Faculty (School) of Engineering Sciences.

At Rice University, he held the William and Stephanie Sick Professorship of Entrepreneurship in the Brown School of Engineering and founded the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which assisted in the launch of more than 160 new technology start-up companies that raised in excess of $300 million in equity capital.  

Currall is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (United Kingdom).  He has been a personal grantee on $23.5 million in research funding, over 80 percent of which came from refereed grants from the National Science Foundation or National Institutes of Health.  He was lead author of a book on university-business-government collaboration entitled, Organized Innovation: A Blueprint for Renewing America’s Prosperity (Oxford University Press), the culmination of a National Science Foundation-funded 10-year research project on interdisciplinary research involving science, engineering and medicine.

He has published in science and engineering journals such as Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, and Issues in Science and Technology.  In the field of management, he has published broadly using quantitative and qualitative research methods.  He has served as a member of numerous editorial review boards, including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Organization Science.

Currall earned a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Cornell University, a M.Sc. in social psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. in psychology from Baylor University.