Rodney Mullen

If you Google “Godfather of Modern Skateboarding,” Rodney Mullen pops up for creating most of today’s tricks while becoming the most dominant world champion in its history. After studying chemical engineering at UF, he co-founded the era’s largest skate company. Mullen is widely credited for today’s board and wheel designs, earning two patents along the way. After its sale, he turned to Linux, finding parallels between skate and hacker cultures that foster innovation. His very first talk on this went to TED; since then, he’s spoken at Apple, Nike, IBM, JPL, MIT, Wired BizCon, BrainMind (Stanford), UVA Med School, Condé Nast Editors-in-Chief meeting, and more.

Mullen’s been in the public eye since his teenage years. His skate videos litter YouTube with tens of millions of views; just his "Best Of" has 24M. He's featured in 9 of Activision’s Tony Hawk games (THPS). Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon modeled a lead character after him; his performance (with no acting experience) was submitted for a BAFTA. Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Vogue also published articles on him for his video, "Liminal," in July 2016, which trended #1 on Facebook for days. The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Wired (13-pages) have all written articles on Mullen. He’s also featured in multiple books, including an autobiography by Regan Books.

In recognition of his creative contributions, The National Academy of Sciences featured Mullen in their 2015 study, Educating to Innovate. In 2018, the CTO of IBM-VMWare collaborated with him on a chatbot, then co-wrote a paper for IBM with his team. By 2019, Mullen was named a Fellow at MIT Media Lab, where he collaborates with students, including a paper (accepted) on embodied cognition as it relates to VR. In 2021, he was appointed Distinguished Research Scholar at the Smithsonian. In 2022, a Getty Exhibit featured Mullen in downtown LA. He is also a founder in an Augmented Reality phone game, called SKATRIX. Mullen still skates every day.