Dr. Warner is the Bank of America Endowed Professor of Entrepreneurship and the Director of the Center for Black Entrepreneurship (CBE). A collaboration among the Black Economic Alliance Foundation, Spelman College, and Morehouse College, the CBE aims to grow the pipeline of Black entrepreneurs and connect them to investment and commercial opportunities. By increasing investment in Black-founded companies, the CBE will ultimately contribute to closing the investment gap. Prior to joining the CBE, Dr. Warner served as the Director of Innovation for the College of Engineering and Architecture and the Office of Research at Howard University. He was the Howard University PI for the Mid-Atlantic NSF I-Corps Hub which is a $15MM effort to catalyze the lab-to-market ecosystem across Mid-Atlantic region. Dr. Warner is also co-PI for the Pathways to Commercialization effort which is exploring the commercialization capacity at HBCUs across the country. Additionally, Dr. Warner has extensive experience in Lab-To-Market commercialization. He has supported the signature Lab-To-Market accelerator in the country, the I-Corps program, across several federal agencies including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy. He has served as an instructor in those programs and helped to develop the curriculum to support “deep tech” innovation. This has also extended to international Lab-To-Market programs where he provided similar support to the Korean Innovation Center KIC-Start program, Innovate Egypt, and GIST programs run by the Department of State.
He received a B.S. degree from Cornell University, an M.S. degree from Penn State University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University all in Mechanical Engineering.