Richard Jenkins

Richard Jenkins is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he teaches 33301 (Management, Labor and Industrial Relations) and 33303 (Managing in the Regulated Environment).

Jenkins has 25 years of management experience under regulated environments, ranging from organized labor/unions under the Department of Labor, to biomedical development under the Food and Drug Administration and airlines under the Federal Aviation Administration. He has founded one National Institutes of Health SBIR-financed company and serves on the board of a second.

Airline employers include Southwest Airlines where he serves as a Chief Pilot and JetBlue Airways, where he was employee number 177. He has started two biomedical companies (Electrogram and Ann Arbor Biomedical) and later worked in private equity/venture capital at Arch Development Partners, concentrating on portfolio drug and FDA-regulated companies.

His research interests include the application of the Booth quantitative framework to union membership sentiment measurement through the use of statistical sampling and surveying, and the development/use of innovative methods to populate medical device research trials.

Jenkins headed the strategic arm of the Southwest Airlines Pilot Association, a powerful transportation union. During his five-year tenure, he assisted in the facilitation of the merger between two public companies (LUV/AAI) and the resultant workforce seniority integration which was completed without requiring union-forced arbitration. He testified before the Department of Justice Anti-trust division regarding the projected competitive effects of the Southwest Airlines/AirTran Airways merger.

He worked at the venture capital firm Arch Development Partners, concentrating on the commercialization of university research and portfolio company challenges and opportunities under the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health biomedical research Innovation funding.

Jenkins received his MBA with honors from the University of Chicago, where his team placed second in the Polsky New Venture Challenge (Varna Research, a medical device testing company). He served on the Booth admissions committee for five years.

In 1992 as a biomedical entrepreneur, Jenkins founded Electrogram, a biomedical data firm which serves cardiac device developers. He co-founded Ann Arbor Biomedical, a cardiac device test developer that received a National Institute of Health (NIH) innovation phase I grant and he currently serves as an investor and board member of Cardioalarm, which also received phase I and phase II NIH grants to develop a subcutaneous arrhythmia monitor.

Jenkins is an active investor in startup ventures and commercial real estate. He holds a patent on the design and testing of implantable cardioverter devices.