Michael had an international business career before joining NJIT’s School of Management as assistant professor of finance. He spent his last Wall Street years at Bear Stearns as senior managing director of the emerging markets fixed income business.  Earlier stints included positions of increasing responsibility at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb and Salomon Brothers, where he worked in the Government Arbitrage group with John Meriwether.  Upon leaving Wall Street, Ehrlich started FineStar Imaging LLC, a small technology company that specialized in document production and management.  He sold FineStar in 2007.  Today, along with teaching, Ehrlich participates in NJIT’s small business incubator program, the Enterprise Development Center (EDC). Ehrlich, who belongs to the New York Angels, works with start-up companies.

I am an electrical engineer who was thrust in the mid-80’s into entrepreneurship.  After decades of helping students from the vantage point of industry, I am now helping startups from the vantage point of academia.

My research interests follow three paths: cross-cultural experiential entrepreneurship education, innovation-driven business incubation, and mobile healthcare innovation.  In addition to teaching most NJIT courses in entrepreneurship, I am also a serial entrepreneur and currently the founding partner of an m-health company that conducts wireless public health campaigns for CDC, NIH, EPA, and foreign ministries of health.   I help students and alumni launch their own startups and secure funding; if their product or service is in my technology wheelhouse, I help with product development as well.

I received a Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University at Buffalo, NY, with a concentration in biomimetic machine vision and AI.  My work has yielded journal and conference publications and book chapters, four patents, the NASA Space Act award, and two Small Business of the Year Nominations from the US Department of Defense.  I am Associate Editor of the Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, Senior Member of the IEEE, serve on the board of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and have served as Director of the Academy of the International Council for Small Business.  I work with an awesome team of Ph.D students in Business Data Science, and in 2018 I was honored with the NJIT Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award, and in 2020 designated NJIT Master Teacher.

When I am not in publish-or-perish mode, I rebuild antique single-ended vacuum tube amps, jam on vintage Moog synthesizers, and try to keep roadworthy a 5.0L Mustang ragtop, all which are older than my students.