Zoltan J. Acs, Ph.D., was born in a refugee camp in Villach, Austria in 1947 to Hungarian parents who fled Hungary after the Second World War. He immigrated to the United States in 1952 on the USS General S. D. Sturgis, a WWII troop carrier, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio where he was a part of the Hungarian refugee community. After graduating from Cleveland State University, he moved to New York City where he received his Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research. He is University Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Policy (CEP) at George Mason University USA. He is affiliated with the College of Business and Economics at the University of Pecs in Hungary. Previously he was Professor of Management at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Research Scholar at the ‘Entrepreneurship Growth and Public Policy Group’ at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena, Germany. He has served as, Chief Economist at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) under two U.S. presidents, was a Research Fellow at the U. S. Bureau of the Census, Associate Director of the Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) at the University of Maryland and Research Fellow at the Science Center Berlin, Research Associate at the Institute on Western Europe at Columbia University and Scholar-in-Residence at the Kauffman Foundation.
Visiting Fellow at MCC: September - October 2022