“Entrepreneurship is sustainability for your passion.”
Dr. Stern holds a degree in art and design from Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, a Masters of Professional Studies in Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) from New York University, and a PhD from an Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department at Trinity College Dublin (University of Dublin). He has worked as a consultant, director, board member, designer, and/or engineer at and with various companies and non-profits in New York, California, Ohio, South Africa, Ireland, and all across Wisconsin. He has been PI, lead, mentor, and/or Co-PI in several state-wide and national engineering and entrepreneurship grants, including ongoing projects through the National Science Foundation and National Endowment of the Arts, and work with the Stanford D.School and Venturewell, and has been involved with several multi-million dollar gifts toward educational efforts around entrepreneurship.
In short, Stern “speaks” business, engineering, and the arts, all with a sensitivity to the relationships between culture and industry – how the latter support and mobilize each other, in both the short- and long-term. Stern’s expertise have helped businesses learn about themselves, come up with products and ideas, test markets and channels, grow or invest in new areas, and design and build prototypes for testing.
“I firmly believe in the social contracts between art and industry, the academy and government. Together they create research and development into the unknown.”
Dr. Stern holds a joint appointment as full Professor between Art & Design and Mechanical Engineering at UWM, and is the Director of the UWM Startup Challenge: a unique, co-curricular, university-wide program that creates a culture of innovation at UWM by encouraging students to develop their ideas, launch businesses, and gain the skills that come from entrepreneurial experience. He teaches artists how to engineer, engineers how to “art,” and everyone how to sustain their passions.
His largest current research project explores creative and ethical uses of AI, by introducing interdisciplinary and diverse voices, training sets, fine tuning, data, outputs, and more across the fields of art and engineering, innovation and entrepreneurship.
With the Startup Challenge, students are given the opportunity to participate in hands-on workshops and develop their concepts through one-on-one mentorship from faculty and staff: design thinking, brainstorming, customer discovery processes, prototype development, financials, testing, the business model canvas and lean launch, storytelling, leadership, and more, are all encountered, among a plethora of art, design, business, and engineering tools. Also through the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center‘s outreach programming, Stern and his colleagues workshop these practices, tools, and strategies in industry, with K-12 instructors, and at non-profits looking to better understand what they do, why, for whom, and the best ways forward.
In early 2022, Stern received an NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) grant as the Principle Investigator and Executive Director of ABLE: the Autism Brilliance Lab for Entrepreneurship. This is a multi-year partnership with the non-profit, Islands of Brilliance, where they will use art and design to foster skills, job creation, entrepreneurship, and community, with autistic peoples. Mark Fairbanks (IOB) will act as Content Director, and Dr. Celeste Campos-Castillo (UWM Sociology) is Research Director. Read IOB’s full announcement. Stern is also the co-founder and CNO (Chief Networking Officer) of Eco Labs DAO, a web3 based company that leverages to power of the Blockchain to reverse climate change.
In his time as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Stern has consulted on and supported projects at Rexnord, Rockwell, TAPCO, Johnson Controls, GE Medical, Aurora Health Care, the Medical College of Wisconsin, DRS Power and Control, the Wisconsin Department of Traffic, Badger Meter, Briggs and Stratton, Eaton, and many more; he has helped to place students at startups, engineering and market-based companies, museums and galleries, and consulting and design firms, across the country; and through his ongoing efforts at the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, he continues to fund and advise dozens of new ventures in the Milwaukee area every year. For Stern, this work is completely in line with the work he does in the arts and humanities, the latter including performances and exhibitions worldwide, academic and mainstream writing, and other diverse activities that might manifest as, for example, empowerment workshops for HIV-positive township teens in South Africa, Fulbright-funded writing seminars for postgraduates in design, or one-on-one mentoring for local artists through the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network. In all, he creates fertile ground through investment in advanced research and human resources, which in turn makes for ingenuity and opportunity across the culture and industry ecosystem.
CV Downloads: Abbreviated Resume (2 pages), Academic CV (11 pages),
Artist CV (8 pages), or Unabridged Academic CV (33 pages)