John Fox, a 1992 graduate of Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences,
carries with him an important value that his mother instilled in him-to put things
back the way he found them.
It is a value that forms the foundation of the work that Fox does today. As president
and CEO of Innovation Fuels, a leading U.S. biodiesel manufacturer and a regional
company with a global reach, Fox is among those leading the charge to make the
Earth a more sustainable place. With a recent gift to SU's L.C. Smith College of
Engineering and Computer Science (LCS), Fox has made a commitment to
educating generations to come about the need for sustainability and developing new
innovations, and ways to make that happen.
Fox and his wife, Carol, of New York City, have made a seven-figure commitment of
up to $3.5 million dollars to LCS to establish an endowed professorship in sustainable
energy studies.
Counted in The Campaign for Syracuse University total, the gift is among the first
that will be bolstered through Faculty Today, a new gift challenge program created
to encourage donors to endow faculty chairs and professorships. Designed to
accelerate the University's ability to recruit and retain world-class faculty, Faculty
Today will supplement the earnings from the professorship in sustainable energy
studies endowed fund for five years. Additionally, LCS will provide an equivalent
contribution multiplying the buying power of the gift and enabling the college to
soon hire and retain an outstanding faculty member. The program was developed by
the SU Board of Trustees, which allocated $30 million from the University's
endowment in support of the new initiative. To learn more about Faculty Today, visit
http://facultytoday.syr.edu.
"We are immensely grateful to John and Carol Fox for their foresight and leadership
in endowing this professorship in Sustainable Energy Studies," says LCS Dean Laura
Steinberg. "This is an excellent example of Scholarship in Action . It will enable the
college to recruit and retain a new breed of faculty member, who will prepare the
next generation of engineers and conduct groundbreaking research at the interface of
many engineering disciplines."
In addition to allowing the hiring of a new faculty member, it is expected that the
professorship will foster a strong collaborative relationship between the faculty in
sustainable energy studies and the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental
and Energy Systems, a federation of universities, corporations and government
partners based at SU, as well as the SUNY College of Environmental Science and
Forestry. This professorship will facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to sustainable
energy studies, drawing on the strengths of multiple schools and colleges at the
University. The College of Arts and Sciences, the
Maxwell School of Citizenship and
Public Affairs, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the
Martin J.
Whitman School of Management, among others, have been identified as potential
collaborating schools and colleges.
"The sustainable energy studies professorship will provide a focal point for Syracuse
University's efforts to develop new technologies to address the growing gap between
the world's energy needs and its energy supplies," says Steinberg. "While the
emphasis of the professor will be on developing processes for the extraction and
utilization of energy, she/he will work closely with other faculty in such areas as
public communication, innovation management, energy policy studies and
fundamental science. This broad collaboration is necessary to investigate and exploit
the full range of opportunities and options potentially available for meeting the
world's energy needs."
Fox says that at its core, the gift that he and his wife have made to LCS will advance
three ideals they strongly believe in: preservation and promotion of the natural world,
education and a focus on renewable energy. Urgent problems such as global
warming, the world's heavy dependence on fossil fuels and environmental pollution
require creative, out-of the box solutions developed by today's students and future
generations to come, he says.
"I am a big believer in human ingenuity," Fox says. "We need to build up
technology, ethics and mindfulness of what we want a sustainable world to look like
in many aspects. We are still operating under the original energy infrastructure, and
we have a significant opportunity to move to version two."
Fox says he is especially impressed with the platform in sustainability that has been
created at SU under the leadership of Chancellor and President Nancy Cantor.
"There is so much cross-pollenization that happens at the University," he says in
regards to the numerous collaborations on sustainability issues currently under way
at the University. "That kind of approach exponentially raises the ability to succeed
at what we are setting out to do."
Becoming an entrepreneur was not at the forefront of Fox's plans when he first set
foot on the SU campus in 1988. He majored in political science and German, and was
active in student organizations, including the Student Government Association and
his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. He also studied abroad in France. Fox says his
undergraduate experience at SU left him with a broader perspective of the world. "I
left SU with the ability to see things on a macro level," he says.
After a short stint in politics, Fox began working on building businesses and product
offerings. He earned an M.B.A. at Columbia Business School and led the business
development of a biogas technology company, the financing of an independent oil
and gas company, and the product development of a Lucent Technologies company
before starting a renewable energy project development company, Homeland
Energy Resources Development Inc., in 2001. He started Homeland's biodiesel
division in 2005, which has since merged into Innovation Fuels.
Based in Albany, N.Y., Innovation Fuels supplies biodiesel to regional customers and
a network of international partners through a large processing plant in New Jersey
and other U.S. locations, including a new location in Fulton, N.Y. The company is
also expanding internationally to locations in Antwerp, Belgium, and Singapore, and
has a combined planned production capacity of more than 5 million barrels by 2010.
The company currently employs 30 people.
Fox has to assume a range of roles in running his company and promoting
sustainability-from entrepreneur to researcher, marketing professional to educator.
"We are selling to customers who have never bought biodiesel before and don't really
have that larger view of the positive impact that sustainable and renewable energy
sources have on society," he says. "There is a lot of education that we have to do. We
as an industry are tasked with building a level of knowledge and passing it on to the
next generation."
Innovation Fuels is also at the forefront of working to develop new sources for the
creation of biofuels. The product is currently made from a variety of plant oils as well
as used vegetable oil. Fox and his company are working with experimental studies on
the use of pennycress, a weed with a high oil content that has great potential for use
in the production of biodiesel. The process of intentionally growing weeds comes with
its own challenges, Fox says. "There is plenty of research on how to eradicate weeds but very little on how to
cultivate them," he says.
Fox is looking forward to working with LCS and the University in advancing
sustainability from a concept to common practice. He says he is very impressed with
Steinberg, the new dean of LCS, and her vision for the college regarding sustainable
energy studies. "She has an amazing perspective on the benefits that these new
faculty members will provide the University," he says. "She wants to successfully
develop this new program, and her enthusiasm has made me even more excited
about it.
"I see this gift as a start," Fox says. "Carol and I are proud to be able to seed the
faculty and development of a sustainable program, but I see an opportunity to bring
even more resources in." Fox says he will be a champion for the program among his
colleagues in the sustainable energy field. "We are going to get behind this program,
promote it and grow it," he says.
With a goal of $1 billion, The Campaign for Syracuse University is the most
ambitious fundraising effort in SU's history. By supporting faculty excellence,
student access, interdisciplinary programs, capital projects and other institutional
priorities, the campaign is continuing to drive Scholarship in Action, the University's
vision to provide students, faculty and communities with the insights needed to incite
positive and lasting change in the world. More information is available online at
http://campaign.syr.edu.
