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Dr. Elliot McGucken

E-mail: Author's email address
Updated: 4/20/2005


Bio picture Dr. Elliot McGucken currently leads UNC Chapel Hill's Artistic Entrepreneurship Initiative, where he teaches New Media Arts, Technology, and Entrepreneurship 101.

Born in Ohio, Dr. E grew up outdoors except for when he was sitting in front of a computer. He received a B.A. in physics from Princeton and a Ph.D. in physics from UNC Chapel Hill where his dissertation on an artifical retina for the blind received several NSF grants and a Merrill Lynch Innovations Award. The retina-chip research appeared in publications including Popular Science and Business Week, and the project continues to this day.

In 1995 Elliot founded Classicals & jollyroger.com LLC as a technological tribute to the Great Books, and he recently spoke at the Harvard Law School concerning his authena.org project for Open Source software for managing digital rights for artists. Elliot, known as "Dr. E" to his students, has taught physics and programming at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has published a poetry book, a novel, a collection of essays, several scientific articles, and poetry in The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times deemed jollyroger.com "simply unprecedented," adding that the site "teems with discussion, the kind that goes well beyond freshman lit 101." The Los Angeles Times referred to the classical portal as "a lavish virtual community known as The Jolly Roger."

His two latest projects, authena.org and 22surf.org, seek to empower indy artists, authors, musicians, and creators with Open Source Content Management Systems. Dr. E harbors a vast respect for the indy author and artist, for the entrepreneur and visionary, for the giants of yesteryear whose shoulders we all stand upon. He hopes that authena and 22surf might be of some use to fellow artists and hackers alike.

His latest novel, Autumn Rangers, is being developed as a book, screenplay, and video game at autumnrangers.com.

Tux