Troy, N.Y — Robert A. Chernow has been appointed to the newly created position of Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“We have established a new position of Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship to strengthen our culture of entrepreneurship that integrates and supports the continuum of technological entrepreneurship across the campus,” said Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson. “We will build on Rensselaer’s established strengths in scientific and technological entrepreneurship, interdisciplinary inquiry, and interactive learning and the intellectual foundations of the Lally School of Management and Technology, the Severino Center for Entrepreneurship, the incubator program, and Rensselaer Technology Park.”

“With his experience in understanding and exploiting markets; forming, growing, and managing successful companies and practices; and his more recent work in planning and creating programs in the university sector, Mr. Chernow is uniquely positioned to lead Rensselaer’s efforts to infuse the study, research, and practice of entrepreneurship across the curriculum, with an emphasis on educational programs,” President Jackson said.

Chernow is founder and president of Educational Services for Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit organization assisting universities in shaping their entrepreneurship initiatives. In this role, he has assisted with benchmarking, strategic planning, curriculum redesign, and launching new student and alumni programs. He was a consultant to the Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Leadership Institute at Howard University, serves as a volunteer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Deshpande Center, and has also provided consulting services to a number of other colleges and universities.

Mr. Chernow recently completed an “Atlantic Fellowship” in entrepreneurship working with the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the HM Treasury in the United Kingdom to develop an entrepreneurship position paper culminating in recommendations to make the U.K. a more enterprising nation. This high-level government initiative incorporates business, academic, science, and technology initiatives proposed to be infused at all levels of the public, private, and academic sectors.

Before forming his own consultancy in 2004, Chernow served as senior vice president and head of entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where he worked with universities, women’s/minority organizations, and angel/venture capitalists to expand entrepreneurship programs. At the Kauffman Foundation, he created models for introducing entrepreneurship into all disciplines on a university campus.

Chernow’s interests in entrepreneurship are founded on a 21-year career in the health care industry specializing in health care data analysis and technology. He served as president and chief operating officer at Intelliclaim Inc., Norwalk, Conn.; principal, Global Human Resources Solutions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, New York, N.Y.; president and chief executive officer, New York and Presbyterian Health Plan, New York, N.Y.; senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Value Health Inc., Avon, Conn.; and president, Managed Care Services Group at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Westport, Conn. 

He has founded two companies in the health care management sector: Corporate Health Strategies, New Haven, Conn., and World Specialists Online, Westport, Conn., and Sao Paulo, Brazil. He grew Corporate Health Strategies to $50 million in revenues and negotiated its sale to Metropolitan Life, assuring MetLife’s re-entry into managed care. 

Throughout his career, Mr. Chernow has served as a guest lecturer at universities including MIT, Stanford, and the Harvard Business School, as well as the U.N. Business Council and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He earned a B.A. in Economics from Colgate University and an M.P.H. in Health Care Management from the University of California, Berkeley.

Contact: Theresa Bourgeois
Phone: (518) 276-2840
E-mail: bourgt@rpi.edu