Alumni Excellence Awards: Research Award Recipient Dan Flynn '81

Daniel Flynn ’81 developed his passion for science at a Chesapeake Bay pond near his hometown of Shady Side, Maryland.

There, for a high school science class, he collected aquatic specimens that he studied under a microscope. The phytoplanktons and bacteria, in all of their shapes and sizes, evoked the colors and portraits of Flynn’s artist mother. The science reminded him of the work of his physician-scientist uncle.

“I was seeing the microorganisms sort of like an artist would,” Flynn says. “It was at that moment that I said, ‘This is what I would like so study.’”

The experience helped launch him on a path, not just of scientific inquiry, but of entrepreneurship – an art form all its own. Flynn committed himself to ensuring that the wider world could reap the benefits of discovery and innovation.

He created Flynn Biotech Consulting, which helps biotech companies, and research institutions, including universities, develop and commercialize intellectual property in areas such as virology and cancer research.

“I like creating and innovating, and I’ve always been entrepreneurial,” says Flynn, who earned a microbiology degree at Maryland. “There’s a lot of creativity in how you set up infrastructure, recruit the right people, and put the pieces together.”

He'd bring those skills to a higher education setting. At Florida Atlantic University – from which Flynn retired in 2023 after a more than eight-year stint – he was a professor and vice president for research, boosting research funding from $29 million to $95 million.

The institution, which was striving to become a top research university, was in need of a creative, entrepreneurial approach to research infrastructure, Flynn says. There is a similar striving in private industry.

“The contributions I make are more of the picks and shovels,” he says. “There are a lot of outstanding scientists with great ideas in biotech, but they don’t know how to set up the business side and tie up everything nice with a bow so they can move forward.”

Now retired from FAU, Flynn lives in Boca Raton, Florida, where he provides consulting to a quartet of biotech companies and serves as a consultant and contractor to an executive search firm, Witt Kieffer, Inc.

While on the faculty at FAU, Flynn worked on a project to extract genomes from deep-sea microorganisms, data that could potentially be used to create biosynthetic genes that could help create natural products such as antibiotics, cosmetics, and nutritional additives.

The nature of the work has changed dramatically since Flynn first entered the field. By the time that he became a university administrator, new computational techniques and large data sets were transforming the research landscape. Science was accelerating, in ways that were, and continue to be, faster, more precise, and more impactful.

At Florida Atlantic, that meant it was as important for students to develop entrepreneurial acumen as scientific prowess. Flynn developed an undergraduate research program in which students were given $500 apiece “to create a novel solution for a novel problem.”

“I would tell them, ‘You may not be successful with this company or concept, but you’re going to be so much better than your peers because of the experience,’” he says.

“The most important legacy that anyone can have are the people that you helped along the way,” Flynn adds. “I take great pride in helping them move up and grow.”