Eugene Fitzgerald is the Merton C. Flemings-SMA Professor of Materials Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Visiting Professor of Management and Visiting Engineering Professor at Cornell University. He is an SMA Fellow in the Singapore-MIT Alliance and is the founding director of the Business of Science and Technology Initiative at Cornell and the Kauffman Innovation Interface. He has substantial private sector business experience specializing in the commercialization of core technologies. He is the founder, co-founder, or founding team member in several start-up companies including AmberWave Systems Corporation, Contour Semiconductor, Paradigm Research, LLC, 4Power LLC, and The Water Initiative. He has 50+ issued US patents and has authored and co-authored more than 200 technical papers. He received a BS degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 1985 from MIT, and a PhD in from Cornell University in 1989