W. Mark Crowell

Executive Director and Associate Vice President for Innovation Partnerships and Commercialization
University of Virginia

W. Mark Crowell is the University of Virginia’s first executive director and associate vice president for innovation partnerships and commercialization.

Crowell joined U.Va. after serving as vice president for business development at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and Jupiter, Fla. His responsibilities at Scripps included innovation management and commercialization, new business development, bio-pharmaceutical industry partnerships and venture capital relations. He has extensive experience in technology licensing, start-up company formation, seed capital development, innovation-based economic development initiatives and planning, and research campus planning.

Prior to joining Scripps in early 2009, Crowell spent 8.5 years as associate vice chancellor for economic development and technology transfer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after holding similar positions at North Carolina State University (1992–2000) and Duke University (1987–1992). Over the past 22 years, the technology transfer programs he has directed — those at UNC, NC State and Duke — have helped to launch more than 135 start-up companies as well as numerous products and services. In North Carolina, Mark served on the boards of key economic development and entrepreneurial support agencies, including the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, the Council for Entrepreneurial Development, the Research Triangle Regional Partnership and the Orange County Economic Development Commission.

Throughout his career, Crowell has led many public–private collaborations, including most recently a major initiative to work with Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. to launch an 85,000-square-foot business accelerator, the Carolina Innovation Center, on UNC’s new research campus, Carolina North. Another highlight includes co-founding a $10 million seed fund at NC State (in partnership with the NC Technology Development Authority). Mark also had extensive involvement in planning and managing the widely acclaimed Centennial Campus, a more than 1,200-acre research campus at NC State University

Crowell was the 2005 president of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) and is the founding president of the recently launched AUTM Foundation. Currently, he serves as co-chair of BIO’s Technology Transfer Committee and as a member of the board of directors of CONNECT in San Diego. He has extensive national and international speaking, consulting and management experience related to technology transfer and innovation-based economic development and has been instrumental in forging international research and innovation transfer partnerships on behalf of UNC and Scripps. His consulting and advisory activities have included a number of U.S. and international academic and policy groups and associations, including the National Science Foundation, the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Academies of Sciences, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and many others. Crowell also served on the inaugural board of the University–Industry Demonstration Partnership, an initiative coordinated through the National Academies of Sciences designed to expand collaborations between universities and industry.