Zurbuchen, formerly of U-M, NASA, honored by Center for Entrepreneurship
Honors recognize a career spent combining innovations and entrepreneurship.
The University of Michigan’s Center for Entrepreneurship (CFE) honored co-founder Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen on Friday, with the presentation of a new award bearing his name, as well as the renaming of the center’s long-running Friday speaker series he launched, EHour.
Zurbuchen, a U-M professor in space science and aerospace engineering for more than 20 years, has put together a career spanning academia, private industry, and government. His commitment to connecting engineering and entrepreneurship resulted in CFE’s creation more than 17 years ago.
He returned to campus Friday to present the first Zurbuchen Entrepreneurship Activator and Leader, or ZEAL, Award to alum Jason Bornhorst (BSE, CSE, ’09). Bornhorst, co-founder of the TechArb Student Venture Accelerator in 2009, has a track record of launching successful ventures that started before he graduated. Four of the companies he launched have been acquired.
Bornhorst, an Austin, Texas resident, was the first graduate of the entrepreneurship minor program. Friday’s EHour host, Marc Weiser, managing director of RPM Ventures, described Bornhorst as “our patient zero.”
“Jason represents exactly what the ZEAL Award stands for: bold innovation, community impact and a deep commitment to reflecting the values Dr. Zurbuchen instilled at the CFE,” said Kurt Skifstad, CFE’s Dixon and Carol Doll executive director. “His leadership and engagement with our students make him the ideal inaugural honoree.”
In additional recognition of Zurbuchen, EHour will now be known as the Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen EHour. Since 2008, the speaker series has brought in founders and leaders of companies from across the country to engage with the U-M community and share their stories.
Currently an international speaker and leader of space programs at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, Zurbuchen was the longest serving associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, holding the post from 2016-2022. During his tenure he helped launch 37 missions and start 54 more.
Photo: Jeremy Little/College of Engineering, Communications and Marketing
“Thomas has always been passionate about empowering others to think boldly, to bridge disciplines and to use knowledge as a tool for exploration—whether that’s in space or right here on Earth,” said Karen A. Thole, the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering. “His journey reminds us that engineering and entrepreneurship share the same DNA: curiosity, persistence and the drive to turn vision into reality.”
Zurbuchen received a PhD in physics from the University of Bern in his native Switzerland in 1996, and within weeks moved to the U.S. to join U-M as a research fellow in what is now the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering. A dozen years later, he would be named a full professor and his research focused on solar and heliospheric physics, experimental space research and space systems.
His entrepreneurial mindset created additional opportunities for himself—and the campus community.
As faculty director of CFE in 2007, Zurbuchen’s aim was to coach and inspire U-M students into an entrepreneurial mindset. Today, the Center can boast having engaged with over 30,000 students since beginning operation.
In 2010, Zurbuchen was appointed to the unique role of associate dean of entrepreneurial programs at the College. From this post, he worked across the University and with the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurship to deepen collaboration between entrepreneurship- and innovation-related programs. As a result, beginning in 2015 and every year since, Princeton Review has ranked U-M’s undergraduate entrepreneurship program in the top 10.
On Friday, in front of nearly 200 students and faculty, Zurbuchen’s message honed in on the importance of being able to risk failure on the way to success.
“That attitude of both having courage, and the practice of getting that feedback, iterating and moving forward in a place of ambiguity, toward goals that are very foggy is key,” he said. “So often, things that fail have given me the tools to do things that opened doors far past where my imagination had taken me before.”
Bornhorst’s link with TechArb is just one of the reasons he was a fit for the first ZEAL Award. On Friday, he credited CFE for providing the right kind of environment, a safe environment
“Sitting here and watching, I can’t help but be overwhelmed with a sense of home,” he said. “There’s been a lot of discussion today on risk taking and, inherently, that implies having the safety one needs to take that risk. I am extraordinarily grateful to Thomas (Zurbuchen), to Mark (Weiser) and to the folks involved in the earliest CFE program for giving me that sense of home here as a student.”
Bornhorst’s portfolio includes DoGood, an iPhone app that encouraged good deeds; Mobiata, which built award-winning travel apps and was acquired by Expedia in 2012; and several health-related companies including First Dollar, whose technology makes it easier to manage health benefit accounts and was acquired by Inspira Financial in 2024.
On October 17, Bornhorst was the featured speaker at EHour, and CFE’s Eric Bacyinski introduced him to a crowd of students and researchers that likely found Bornhorst’s background familiar.
“This guy was literally just like you—he sat in that seat over there,” Bacyinski said. “He took that experience that he had here, he acted upon it. He’s someone who not only sees problems but then builds solutions that can scale accordingly.”