Gerald Gunderson is the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of American Business and Economic Enterprise, and Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Endowment at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, positions he assumed in 1982.  He holds a Ph.D. In economics from the University of Washington, 1967, with a thesis in economic history supervised by Douglass North, Nobel Laureate.  He has held faculty appointments at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Mount Holyoke College and North Carolina State University. 

Dr. Gunderson has published numerous academic papers, including studies of the cause of the American Civil War, The Demise of the Roman Empire, and models of entrepreneurship.  He also has authored columns in more than twenty newspapers in the U.S., including the Wall Street Journal. He has worked with national professional associations concerning entrepreneurship, economic and business history, private enterprise systems, economic education, and public policies.  He served as President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education and until recently was Editor of The Journal of Private Enterprise.  He was a founding member and is a member of the Executive Board as well as the director of the Academic Advisory Board for the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Studies. He received the Freedom Foundation's award for Excellence in Private Enterprise Education in 1980. In 1996 he was appointed by the Governor to the Educational Improvement Panel to develop solutions to poor public schooling in Connecticut.

Dr. Gunderson is the author of The New Economic History of America (McGraw-Hill, 1974) and The Wealth Creators:  An Entrepreneurial History of the United States (E.P. Dutton, 1989; Bearc Publishing, 2004), which Peter Drucker, the mentor of modern management, described as "brilliant." He continues working on the topics of global entrepreneurship as well as the growth of anti-slavery sentiment in the U.S.