Jeri Childers

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Australia)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerichilders

Biographical Abstracts

Dr. Jeri Childers teaches and coaches leaders in innovation and entrepreneurship. She launched and directed the University of Technology–Sydney Engineering and Information Technology Techcelerator, which enables early-stage tech founders and their industry partners to prototype and validate their commercial ideas in deep technologies. Childers designs and delivers leadership development activities for those leading change, innovation, or entrepreneurial activities. She develops teams with a focus on entrepreneurial mindsets, use of design thinking, and creative methods for problem solving, customer validation, and commercialisation.

Childers’s research is in the areas of entrepreneurial mindsets; leading for innovation; entrepreneurial education; career and venture development in the tech sector; work integrated learning; and industry-engaged, interdisciplinary, project-based learning. She started her research and development activities focused on how universities engage with their community partners to create positive impact. At Virginia Tech she founded the Engagement Academy for University Leaders and at the Pennsylvania State University she founded the Outreach Scholarship conferences that emerged in 1999 and later formed the Engaged Scholarship Consortium. She started her career at the University of Missouri–Columbia, College of Business and Public Administration, in the Missouri Training Institute focused on developing adult education leaders.

 

Areas of Expertise

• Leadership and team development
• The scholarship of engagement in higher education
• Interdisciplinary, project-based, experiential, entrepreneurial education
• Innovation, entrepreneurship, commercialization in deep technologies
• Advancing and accelerating female leaders and founders in the tech sector