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Entrepreneurial Award

RANDOL R. SPAULDING, ENG '83
West Bend, Wis.

Randy’s company, Spaulding Clinical Research, strives to create a world of safer drugs and be a technology leader in making hospital-quality cardiac care affordable to all of God’s children.

Randy is CEO of Spaulding Clinical, which provides clinical pharmacology and cardiac core lab clinical research services and is a medical device manufacturer. The company, which he founded in 2007, employs more than 140 people among all its business units.

“I love challenging myself to be a heroic leader — for example, contributing to the very real possibility of advancing safer and more effective medications or using our work to eradicate sudden cardiac death from the planet,” he says.

While establishing the Clinical Pharmacology unit, Randy’s team further enhanced clinical research by designing a new ECG device. In 2010, he opened Spaulding Core Labs, a cardiac safety testing center for new drugs under development. In 2011, the company launched the Spaulding Electrocardiograph — Spaulding Clinicals’ handheld, proprietary ECG device.

Spaulding Clinicals’ year-over-year growth rate is 150 percent. Randy has received numerous awards from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Top Workplaces Survey for Southeastern Wisconsin: CEO of the Year in 2012, provider of Best Company Direction in 2011, and a Top 5 Workplace for 2011 and 2012.

Randy serves on the board of directors of the United Way of Washington County, Wis., Concordia University Foundation and Albrecht Free Health Care Clinic and is part of a group that conducts free heart screening events for children and young adults at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Milwaukee, the University of Wisconsin–Washington County, Casa Guadalupe, and Lambeau Field. He’s also active in his parish.

Hometown: Milwaukee
Favorite quotes: “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” — Rev. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by sweat and dust and blood; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in worthy causes; who at the best knows in the end of triumph of high achievement, and who at worst fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.” — President Theodore Roosevelt
Dream dinner guest: “Pope Francis, specifically for his ideas on how to ‘reframe’ capitalism, how it relates to business practices today and how I as a business leader can be a part of this change.”
Marquette faculty members who had an impact on you: “Rev. Phil Rossi, S.J., and Rev. Joe Lienhard, S.J. As an engineering student, my brain was constantly exercised with math, science and all known laws of nature. Fathers Rossi and Lienhard complemented this by ‘twisting my mind’ to contemplate the vastly larger exercise of what we don’t know, can’t solve — the laws of nature that we cannot solve absolutely and put into neat equations. This was pure delight for my mind and expanded it well beyond the traditional engineering education. It fundamentally changed the way I viewed myself and my relation to the world.
“Also, Rev. William Pauly, S.J., and my uncle, Bert Thelen. While I was in undergraduate school, Father Bill and Bert helped my wife, Amy, and I develop as a couple and as parents. They were supportive and loving to Amy and me and our daughter Amanda. Bert celebrated our wedding, our children’s births and their baptisms. He has been a constant support and role model for our six children.”
Favorite Marquette memories: “Being a young married couple on campus junior and senior years and having our oldest daughter Amanda at that time. And many hours in St. Joan of Arc Chapel, immersed in peace and solitude.”
Career you aspired to in grade school: “A dentist or an architect because it fit well with my love of math and science.”
Marquette legacy: Bert Thelen, Jour ’55, Grad ’61; brothers Ron, Arts ’94, and Rodney Bus Ad ’95; daughters Amanda, H Sci ’03, Cassandra, Nurs ’05, Grad ’07, Catherine, Arts ’07, and Claire, Arts ’12; son Randol, Jr., Eng ’17; and sons-in-law Jason Baltz, Law ’00, and Matt Wessel, Comm ’03, Grad ’11.
Most influential person: “It’s a tie between my father and my Uncle Bert. Both provided such a strong but complementary example of what being a man for God really is. My father taught me a zest and love of life, seeing God in everyone, and the value of hard work and discipline. My Uncle Bert taught me how to freely love and break through ego and testosterone at a time and place where men were taught to be tough, to never cry or show weakness. Uncle Bert taught me that it is precisely when I am weak that I am strong.”