Five professors named Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows

The Doherty Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership has selected Elon University faculty members Dave Gammon, Craig Schmitt, Megan Squire, Frances Ward-Johnson and Hal Vincent to serve as Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows for the 2015-16 academic year.

The Doherty Center received a grant from the Coleman Foundation to name five faculty members to the Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows Program.

The Coleman Foundation aims to encourage non-business professors to incorporate elements of entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial thinking into their courses. Recipients of one-year fellowships engage in projects that strengthen the professor’s efforts to grow entrepreneurship education across campus.

The grant includes a stipend, attendance at a three-day workshop in Chicago where fellows from across the country meet to share best practices, as well as discretionary funds to involve students in projects, competitions and activities throughout the academic year.

The Elon University 2015-16 Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows are:

Dave Gammon is an associate professor of biology who described his primary role at Elon University as taking science to the masses. The integrative courses he primarily teaches are designed for students of diverse, non-science majors and he engages in numerous science outreach activities, such as writing editorials for over a dozen newspapers, giving public talks for community organizations, and directing Tectonic Plates: Alamance County’s Science Café.Most of his research with students focuses on understanding how and why mockingbirds imitate other bird species.

Craig Schmitt is an assistant professor of sport and event management beginning his third year at Elon University. He has experience working in a variety of roles in the nonprofit sector of sport and community recreation, is a member of several national organizations, and has presented at both regional and national conferences. His teaching and research interests include sport consumer behavior, sport marketing, sport finance and sport management education.

Megan Squire, a professor of computing science, is a software developer and database designer by trade. Squire studies free, libre and open-source software (FLOSS), specifically the collection, curation, and federation of large amounts of textual data. Her primary research interest is in the area of large database systems, especially data collection, aggregation and mining. She co-founded and leads the FLOSSmole project, a team of software developers who write programs to collect and analyze this FLOSS data, and then freely provide the data sets and results back to the scientific research community.

Hal Vincent, a lecturer and faculty director of Live Oak Communications, enjoyed more than 12 years in account management at advertising agencies Foote Cone & Belding, The Martin Agency, and WestWayne (now 22 Squared) for clients including Marriott, Nabisco, Tropicana, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the Florida Aquarium and The Orlando Convention and Visitors Bureau. He joined academe full time in 2009 and served at the Interim Director of The Zimmerman Advertising Program at the University of South Florida before joining Elon University in 2013. He teaches strategic communications courses such as campaign planning, advertising techniques and research. His research focus is strategic communications pedagogy and student experiential learning, and advertising account management best practices.

Frances Ward-Johnson is associate professor of communications and Faculty Fellow for Leadership. She teaches courses in strategic communications and leadership, including a civil rights course focused on nonviolence and the civil rights movement. She has co-led study abroad classes to Barbados and Greece and has twice served as interim department chair and associate department chair for five years in the School of Communications. She is serving as this year’s elected Head of the Minorities and Communication Division for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Ward-Johnson was named the 2013 National Faculty Advisor of the Year for Lambda Pi Eta Honor Society, National Communication Association.

Returning 2014-15 Coleman Fellows are:

Derek Lackaff, assistant professor of communications
James Marchant, coordinator of arts administration program
Alan Russell, associate professor of mathematics
​Tony Weaver, associate professor sport & event management