Dean Chang

Dean Chang is committed to helping students and researchers discover and cultivate the innovator and entrepreneurial mindset inside of them through design thinking, lean startup and team-based experiential learning. He is the University of Maryland’s founding associate vice president for the Academy for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (AIE), reporting to the university's president and provost and tasked with engaging all 37,000 students in all 12 colleges in innovation. Prior to AIE, Chang oversaw the Clark School of Engineering’s technology startup venture programs. He is also a lead principal investigator and instructor in the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Node program. 

Prior to UMD, Change spent 15 years in Silicon Valley where he served dual roles as the chief technology officer and vice president, gaming business of Immersion Corporation.  He joined Immersion as employee #4 and helped transform the venture-backed, Stanford University robotics lab spinout into a publicly traded (NASDAQ: IMMR), world-leading licensor of haptics technology embedded in hundreds of millions of products from companies like Microsoft, Apple, BMW, Samsung and Electronic Arts.  

Chang holds over 40 U.S. and international patents and is a Pi Tau Sigma graduate from MIT, Ph.D. graduate from Stanford, Palmer Scholar MBA from Wharton and an engineering Air Force Office of Scientific Research Fellow.