Published: February 06, 2015

UT Professor Named Fellow of USASBE

Rebecca White, professor of entrepreneurship, James W. Walter Distinguished Chair of Entrepreneurship and director of the Entrepreneurship Center at The University of Tampa, was selected by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) to be a Justin G. Longenecker Fellow. The award was announced during USASBE’s annual conference in January, which was held in Tampa and co-hosted by UT.

“Dr. Rebecca White is an exemplar of what it means to be a Justin G. Longenecker Fellow of the USASBE,” said Charles H. Matthews, founder of the Center for Entrepreneurship Education and Research at the University of Cincinnati who was named a fellow in 2003. “While some fellows may excel in one or two areas in our profession, she is beyond compare in all four.”

Mathews listed these four areas as advocacy for entrepreneurship and small business management; service to USASBE; recognized nationally as a scholar and/or researcher in entrepreneurship and small business management; and demonstrated excellence as an outstanding teacher, lecturer and presenter in entrepreneurship and small business nationally.

Selection as a fellow is the highest recognition offered by USASBE and is given to those who have made an outstanding contribution to the development, furtherance and benefit of small and medium businesses.

The USASBE Fellows Award recognizes the achievements of those men and women whose passion for small business and entrepreneurship is reflected in their teaching, writing, research, training and public service. Since 1986, 66 educators, researchers, government officials, small business advocates and trade association leaders have been selected as USASBE Fellows.

White has played a pivotal role in advancing the entrepreneurship program at UT. USASBE named UT’s program the 2014 Outstanding Emerging Entrepreneurship program in the country.

White was named the Tampa Bay Business Journal Business Woman of the Year in 2010 in the education category, was a 2006 Athena Award finalist and a 2005 recipient of the Freedoms Foundation Leavey Award for Excellence in Private Enterprise Education. Prior to her work at UT, she built a top 25-ranked entrepreneurship program at Northern Kentucky University. White later started several companies, including Risk Aware LLC, a risk mitigation company for higher education. She is also director at North Star Bank and served as the 2012 president of USASBE.

Also at the conference, Susan Steiner, chair/associate professor of management at UT, was presented the USASBE Best Paper in Social Entrepreneurship Award sponsored by Farleigh Dickinson University, along with co-author Debbi Brock of Wingate University as authors of “Social Entrepreneurship Education Across the Disciplines: A Loosely Coupled Ecosystem.”

For more information, contact James Zebrowski, staff assistant II for the UT Entrepreneurship Center, at jzebrowski@ut.edu.