Bioengineer-turned-entrepreneur Pashos named MSU E-Center director
Contact: Carl Smith
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State’s newest Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach director is helping Bulldogs turn their cutting-edge ideas into money-making businesses.
Nick Pashos, a bioengineer who successfully spun off a company based on his doctoral research in 2015, joined the university in August. Housed in the College of Business, the unit, also known as the E-Center, is MSU’s primary support for emerging entrepreneurs—from MSU students, faculty and staff to others not affiliated with the university—offering a wide range of assistance, including professional mentorship, financial seeding and physical working space.
“Mississippi State has everything you could ask for from educational, research and business perspectives,” Pashos said. “In five years, I’d love to see entrepreneurship really integrated into a lot of the areas that traditionally are siloed from the business world.”
College of Business Dean Scott Grawe said Pashos “has hit the ground running and is already making key connections across campus and in the business community.”
“The E-Center has experienced tremendous growth in the past several years, and I look forward to continued growth in years to come under Nick’s leadership,” Grawe said.
In addition to numerous patents, Pashos holds a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from Drexel University and a Ph.D. in bioinnovation from Tulane University. During his stint at Tulane, he founded BioAesthetics Corp., a company developing grafts for people undergoing soft tissue reconstruction surgeries, including mastectomy and burn patients. A successful fundraiser, Pashos received a combined $10.5 million in investments for his endeavors and served as the principal investigator for numerous Small Business Innovation Research/Technology Transfer grants. He also went through the National Science Foundation’s I-CORPS program twice with his spin-out company. MSU is the location of a regional I-CORPS program run by the Office of Technology Management with E-Center support.
Pashos credits the growth of his company to a faculty-developed connection with a venture capital-backed accelerator program, IndieBio.
“I was an engineer, so I mainly took classes in engineering. Outside of a business class here or there, I had no idea what it took to start a business when I was still a student,” Pashos said. “I came back to academia to help students who are in the same position I was in. Seeing someone exactly where you were years ago and helping them through those steps and hurdles—it’s a really exciting opportunity.”
Grawe said Pashos’ experience working with faculty and students across multiple disciplines makes him “a great fit for our program.”
“Our entrepreneurship center serves students, faculty and staff across the entire university. Nick’s background and understanding of engineering and his ability to connect with people from a variety of disciplines will help us continue to build a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation throughout MSU,” Grawe said. “His experience as an entrepreneur allows him to provide mentorship and guidance to our students using his own challenges and successes to teach valuable lessons.”
Originally launched in a two-person office suite approximately 15 years ago, the E-Center has grown into a 4,000-square-foot hub in McCool Hall offering faculty-in-residence offices, on-demand space for instructors of innovation-related courses to meet with students, and other areas for emerging entrepreneurs to develop their ideas. The center’s off-campus entrepreneurship footprint also includes the 2,000-square-foot Idea Shop, a collaboration between the College of Business and School of Human Sciences housing the Turner A. Wingo Maker Studio and MSU Retail Product Accelerator in downtown Starkville; coworking space in Starkville’s Innovation Hub; and a satellite office in Vicksburg.
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