Judi Eyles, the Iowa State University director of Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship, recalls taking a career aptitude test.
The results? She was destined to be a nurse.
That’s not how her life went. Instead, she’s about to celebrate 30 years in 2026 of leading entrepreneurship efforts at ISU.
“I didn’t ever go into medicine, but … I always want to help people,” she said in an interview at the Core Facility at the ISU Research Park “I can be a good resource for people.”
Eyles, also a long distance runner, is full of energy and “always running,” her colleagues say.
“She’s … the face of entrepreneurship for Iowa State,” said David Sly, the director of the Start Something program in the College of Engineering, which is the entrepreneurial effort in the College of Engineering. He also teaches in the department of industrial engineering. “There is no one on campus who really wears that badge like Judi does.”
Eyles joined the newly founded Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship in 1996. In 2017, she became director, guiding the center’s evolution into a globally recognized hub for entrepreneurial learning and innovation, according to ISU. Today, the center hosts entrepreneurship-focused programs like CYstarters, competitions like the College-by-College Pitch Off and the ISU Startup Factory incubator and more.
ISU recently climbed five spots to rank in the top 10 of The Princeton Review’s 20th annual ranking of undergraduate schools for entrepreneurship studies for the first time in school history. ISU’s No. 9 ranking is a testament to the growth of entrepreneurial courses, programs and activities across campus, according to the university. ISU remains the top-ranked university in Iowa and No. 4 in the Midwest in the 2026 rankings.
The center has other accolades to celebrate as well. The Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers announced in November of 2022 that the ISU Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship was the winner of the 2022 Nasdaq Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence Award, the highest honor presented during the 2022 GCEC Awards. And Eyles, in October, received the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers Legacy Award, honoring her nearly 30 years of leadership in entrepreneurship education and her lasting impact on students, faculty and entrepreneurs.
David Spalding, the interim president of ISU and the former Raisbeck endowed dean of the Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, said his goal as dean was to “raise the visibility of the Ivy College of Business” and grow the college.
“I really felt that one of the opportunities for that was to take advantage of a good program we had in entrepreneurship,” he said. “We helped make it a great program.”
Spalding said he saw it as an opportunity to make entrepreneurship a “front porch program” that would draw in students, attention and rankings. Eyles was on a faculty-staff committee that Spalding put together in his first year to grow the college’s standing in entrepreneurship.
“She provided critical leadership on the aspects of that related to being outside the classroom,” he said. “So the things we did as a result of that, we started a major in entrepreneurship [that] for a number of years was the fastest growing major in the college. … We invested in enhanced outside-the-classroom programs, which Judi did a great job creating and growing.”
When Wendy Wintersteen took the reins as president of ISU, she made innovation and entrepreneurship a cornerstone of her presidency, and counted Eyles among her key influencers.
“I was watching what Judi Eyles was doing in the Pappajohn Center,” Wintersteen said in a recent interview. “That was great, but it wasn’t as big as it could be in the university, and it was primarily associated where it was housed, which was in the Ivy College of Business. As president, I had the bully pulpit to lift that up in a big way, and so [in] my installation address I said that we were going to bring innovation and entrepreneurship across the university.”
Eyles recalled how Wintersteen mentioned entrepreneurship at her inauguration.
“It was a surprise to me that she embraced it the way she did,” Eyles said. “But what a welcome surprise. … What she’s done here has made our job so much easier, because we’re a little group out off campus trying to evangelize entrepreneurship all the way across campus, and when you’ve got a president who can inspire deans and faculty members to also embrace and elevate that – nice. We’re going to miss her. A lot.”
It all didn’t start out this way. Eyles had to build the program into what it is now, with 10 full-time employees, more academic programs, the president’s bully pulpit and the litany of awards under her belt.
Eyles started the ISU pitch competition in the early 2000s, which is when students pitch their ideas and get feedback and prizes from a panel of judges.
Sly was among the judges in the early years.
“It was slow,” Sly said. “Obviously the number of applicants for all these positions were low.”
Sometimes, only a few people didn’t win, he said.
But there were bright spots in the beginning.
“Even though it wasn’t a lot of people, I would say that the ideas that were brought to the table were pretty good and she did a good job of running workshops ahead of some of these events to help students improve the quality of their pitches and presentations,” he said.
Eyles also had to confront misconceptions about entrepreneurs in her early years, said Kevin Kimle, the Rastetter chair of agricultural entrepreneurship at ISU.
“It’s like, well, isn’t entrepreneurship for the misfit toys of people that don’t fit in, people that flunk out of university, for the people that don’t get admitted to university?” Kimle said. “It’s getting over that and getting back to the understanding that as Americans, being entrepreneurial, being innovative is really part of our culture and our character.”
She had to confront the question, how does she take this idea of entrepreneurship across a big, decentralized university?
“It makes it hard when it’s like, OK, you’re an entrepreneurship program that is supposed to work across the different colleges at this big university,” Kimle said. “How do I get people to pay attention? How do I create engagement at the student level and faculty level and staff level? How do I attract resources?”
“All those things were definitely not figured out,” Kimle said.
The force of Eyles’ “eternal positivity” got it done, he said.
Eyles credits John Pappajohn, who funded the five Pappajohn entrepreneurial centers around Iowa, at the University of Iowa, ISU, University of Northern Iowa, North Iowa Area Community College and Drake, as one of her early influences.
“I saw that hard work and that positive attitude,” she said. “He just always was willing to try things. … He just was a great idea person, but he made things happen in the state of Iowa… and yet he was the most kind, respectful, humbling person that you’d ever meet.”
When Eyles took over as director in 2017, she had a word of the year she was using to guide her strategy.
And that word was “more.”
“We need to see more students,” she said. “We need to be more visible – and help more people.”
She said she hates to meet a student in their last semester and hear them say they wish they would’ve learned about the entrepreneurial center earlier.
Since then, the team does a lot more orientations, a lot more family visits; one staff member, Jean Walsh, the center’s director of programs and events, reaches out to 200 classes every semester to see if the entrepreneurial center can pitch its services.
Eyles said her goals for the future of the program remain consistent.
“I’d love to be closer to campus,” she said. “That’s been a goal for 30 years. How can I be closer to campus to make it easier for students to find us? We’re very invisible to a lot of students, which is why we have to work so hard.”
She wants to keep reaching students, being more visible and engaging with them more efficiently.
“How do we get in front of people earlier?” she said. “And that was probably the biggest focus … and that’s still a goal. That hasn’t changed. We always have new students, and we always have to catch them.”