Carolyn A. Stephens serves as the Managing Director of Enterprise Collaborations at the University of California, Irvine.
Stephens is leveraging her blend of corporate, start-up, and academic experience to develop and cultivate the entrepreneurial dimension of the American university. Her work supports and ensures the economic impact and commercialization potential of academic knowledge and invention. With Enterprise Collaborations she is fostering a variety of elemental public-private partnerships in order to realize the societal benefits of academic knowledge and invention.
With an expansive career in industry and academia, Stephens has served in a number of executive marketing and management positions with publicly-traded high-tech firms including Western Digital and Emulex, and she co-founded and built a successful technology start-up, Power I/O. She resumed her general management practice as General Manager of the Irvine Technology Center when Power I/O was acquired by Adaptec Corp.
Anticipating the rising importance of the industry-university public-private partnership, Stephens augmented her industry practice as Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor at The George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics and Assistant Director at the Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics at Chapman University.
Stephens has several degrees, including a PhD in Management from the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, an MBA from Pepperdine University, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Southern California.
She also holds several certificates, including Management of Research, Development and Technology-Based Innovation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Strategy, Leadership and Corporate Management from Claremont Graduate University.
Stephens’ other service roles have included the Vice Chair of the Orange County Council and a National Board membership with the American Electronics Association (now TechAmerica). She has been involved with the UCI School of the Arts Dean’s Advisory Council in the area of Digital Arts and as a board member of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Orange County.
Stephens has been nominated twice for the Orange County Business Journal’s Women in Business Award and has served as a mentor for the Women Unlimited Leadership Development program and a founding board member of the Fibre Channel Association, a nonprofit industry organization.
Stephens joined the Claremont Graduate University Board of Trustees in 2019.