S. Thomas Emerson, Ph. D. is an experienced entrepreneur, corporate executive and educator. He is the David T. and Lindsay J. Morgenthaler Professor of Entrepreneurship and serves as Director of the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he is a full-time faculty member. Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, he was President and CEO of Arizona Technology Incubator, a public-private partnership in Scottsdale, Arizona that mentors promising young technology companies. Prior to ATI, he founded and built three venture capital backed high technology companies: Periphonics Corporation of Bohemia, NY and Syntellect Inc. and Xantel Corporation of Phoenix, AZ. Two of these companies (Periphonics and Syntellect) became NASDAQ-listed national market companies. They created in aggregate more than $600 million in shareholder value.

Dr. Emerson holds four U.S. patents and a number of foreign patents and has authored more than 20 technical and scientific publications and numerous business articles. He was named Inventor of the Year by the U.S. Patent Office in 1973 for a highly innovative patent in the voice-processing field, and was named Entrepreneurial Fellow of the University of Arizona in 1986. Inc. Magazine and Arthur Young & Co. named him Arizona’s High-Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in 1989. The Dean's Council of 100 at Arizona State University named him Arizona's Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990. In 2000 he received the Technology Leadership Award from the Arizona Software and Internet Association. He has served as a director of public companies listed on the NASDAQ national market, AMEX and NYSE exchanges, as well as a number of early-stage companies.

Dr. Emerson earned M.A. and Ph. D. degrees in physics from Rice University, Houston, TX, and an S.B. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.