Frank T. Rothaermel is a native of Butzbach, Germany. After high school, he completed a vocational training degree in wholesale and retailing and played semiprofessional hockey. At the point where he had to choose what he would do as his life's work, he left the hockey team, to the dismay of many, and continued his pursuit for undergraduate and master's degrees in economics and history at Duisburg, Germany. He studied for an academic year at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom before he entered the MBA program at BYU. That is where he met the Church. He has now completed his PhD in strategic management and economics at the University of Washington. He was an assistant professor at the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University, and now serves as area coordinator of the doctoral program in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech. Dr. Rothaermel married Kelleyn Quinn in August 1997, and they are the parents of one child.