August 2025 Chapter Meeting - An Entrepreneur's Journey
August 2025 Chapter Meeting - An Entrepreneur's Journey
Jeff Whalen, founder and CEO of MagCorp, will provide the important steps he took to transform an idea into a thriving local business. He will talk about what skills and talents he needed to develop to augment his existing scientific and engineering background in order to get started. Since running a business is often a team sport, he will go through the decision-making process in the classic build vs buy dichotomy not only in procurement but also in retaining the right staff.
Jeff Whalen is the Founder, Director and CEO of MagCorp and holds a PhD in condensed matter chemistry. He has extensive experience in venture creation, having started and operated multiple STEM-enabled companies over his 20 year entrepreneurial career. Magnetics Corporation (MagCorp) was created in 2017 and is a two department company operating worldwide in technology and economic development in commercial superconductivity and magnetism. Jeff was a Research Faculty member at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory from 2012 to 2019, where he led a successful Department of Energy and Department of Defense funded materials science and electromagnet systems research group, until he joined Florida State University’s Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship as the STEM Entrepreneur in Residence from 2019 to 2023, and then later returned to The National High Magnetic Field Lab where he was the Portfolio Director of The Rare Earth Initiative Project until leaving the lab to operate MagCorp in 2024.
