Dr. Murphy is the Goodrich Entrepreneurship Chair, full professor, and founding Director of the Barefield Entrepreneurship Program (BEP) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Since 2018, the BEP has raised over $7 Million and, in 2022, was named USA's top emerging university entrepreneurship program by the US Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE). The BEP realized 378% enrollment growth (2020-2024) and is one of UAB's fastest growing programs in terms of impact and fundraising. Professor Murphy is Historian of the Academy of Management's (AOM) Entrepreneurship Division. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, and was previously Editor-in-Chief of Management Decision and Chair of the AOM's MH Division. He has published extensively in leading outlets and journals including Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Academy of Management Perspectives, Journal of Small Business Management, and Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. He authored the book Mutiny and Its Bounty, published in 2013 by Yale University Press.His 2009 paper, "A model of social entrepreneurial discovery," was ranked by the Journal of Business Ethics in 2021 as #6 in the top 100 most influential articles in the field of social entrepreneurship.  His 2006 paper, “A conceptual history of entrepreneurial thought,” was named by Emerald Publishers in 2017 as one of the publisher’s 50 highest-impact papers, across all of its journals, in the last half-century. In 2024, Techstars named Dr. Murphy an "all star mentor" (top 1% among ~5,000) based on founder feedback. In 2017, prior to moving to Alabama, he was named Future Founder’s inaugural “Entrepreneurship Professor of the Year” across all colleges and universities in the state of Illinois. In 2016, he was named to AmericanInno’s “50 on Fire” for impact on Chicago’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Major outlets regularly seek his perspectives on entrepreneurial topics for TV and print media. A former President of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Cultural Alliance, Professor Murphy lived in Beijing, China as a foreign student in the 1990s and speaks Mandarin Chinese. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded a successful FL and NY-based racehorse training and breeding venture that entered racing programs in five states (2012-2022) and he is active in thoroughbred retirement and aftercare in KY.