John Stewart
Dr. John Stewart was born and raised in Orange, California, about 30 miles south of Los Angeles. His father was always self employed and had a number of small business when Dr. Stewart was growing up. His father was never all that successful, but his father did alright and was always his own boss, something that always appealed to Dr. Stewart. Dr. Stewart was a bit on the adventurous side as a kid. The summer Dr. Stewart turned 17, he drove his ‘57 Ford 1300 miles to Idaho and worked at a fishing lodge near Yellowstone Park. The summer Dr. Stewart graduated from high school he went to New York City and worked in a marketing research firm owned by an uncle.
Dr. Stewart lasted a year in the dorms at UC San Diego before convincing a real estate agent in Del Mar of the virtue of renting otherwise empty summer beach properties to students during the school year to increase the cash flow to the owners. Dr. Stewart spent the next three years in a beach house a block from the ocean (rent: $200 a month, total).
Dr. Stewart went straight to graduate school after college and was one of two Ph.D. students (out of fifty admitted) who was not offered financial aid. By the second week Dr. Stewart had worked his way into a research assistantship. He finished near the top of his class and took his first job at UNC. Dr. Stewart has been in Chapel Hill my whole career, with the exception of a two year stint at Rice University while his wife did postdoctoral work at Texas Medical Center.
Dr. Stewart has taught managerial economics in the MBA program here and corporate finance at Rice. Most of his teaching now is in the entrepreneurship minor, but Dr. Stewart occasionally teaches econometrics, industrial organization and Econ 101. His research is a rather eclectic mix of corporate merger behavior, antitrust, and third world health economics.
Dr. Stewart has been involved with a number of collaborative efforts to put together large research projects and get funding. Though most of these were big team rather than individual efforts, the total funding level of the projects Dr. Stewart has been associated with is in excess of $100 million. Fifteen percent of his next five years will be spent on a $22 million project to do the evaluation work on the Gates Foundation‘s Urban Reproductive Health Initiative. This work will be done with his colleagues at the Carolina Population Center, a very entrepreneurial organization. His work in third world health economics has allowed him to travel all over the world, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Japan, China, Cote d’Ivoire (Africa) and India. Dr. Stewart took on the entrepreneurship project a little more than four years ago and it has been an exciting ride.
He has been married 34years and has two daughters, one a third year dental student at UNC and the other a graduate from Davidson.
"In 1998 I earned $88.52 working as an extra “Patch Adams” which was filmed at UNC. I even got about 5 seconds of face time in the final movie, though I shared the frame with Robin Williams."