Patrick is Goodrich Chair, full professor, and head of the J. Frank Barefield Jr. Entrepreneurship Program in the Collat School of Business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has designed and led many entrepreneurship and technology initiatives, raised millions of dollars for university programs, consulted to and invested in multiple ventures, trained thousands of students, and coached hundreds of successful entrepreneurs worldwide. A multi-award winning teacher and researcher, a range of major media outlets cite his work and he consults to firms and universities.
Dr. Murphy is Scholar in Residence at Innovation Depot, the Southeastern USA's largest entrepreneurial co-working/incubation center, located in downtown Birmingham, AL. In 2017, prior to moving to Alabama, he was named Future Founder’s inaugural “Entrepreneurship Professor of the Year” across all colleges and universities in the state of Illinois. In 2016, he was named to AmericanInno’s “50 on Fire” for his impact on Chicago’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Professor Murphy is Historian of the Academy of Management's Entrepreneurship Division. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, and served previously as Editor-in-Chief of Management Decision as well as Chair of the Academy of Management’s MH Division. He has published extensively in leading journals and outlets including Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Academy of Management Perspectives, Journal of Small Business Management, and Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. He authored the book Mutiny and Its Bounty, published in 2013 by Yale University Press.
His 2009 paper, "A model of social entrepreneurial discovery," was ranked by the Journal of Business Ethics in 2021 as #6 in the top 100 most influential articles in the social entrepreneurship field. His 2006 paper, “A conceptual history of entrepreneurial thought,” was named by Emerald Publishers in 2017 as one of the publisher’s 50 highest-impact papers in the last half-century.
A former President of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Cultural Alliance, Professor Murphy lived in Beijing, China in the 1990s and speaks Mandarin Chinese. A veteran of the US Navy, he is also a thoroughbred racehorse owner and is active in racing, aftercare, and racehorse retirement.
