Andrew Stroup

Early life

Stroup was born in Seoul, South Korea and at the age of 4 months old, was adopted by an Oklahoma family (David and Jimmye Stroup). He grew up in Sand Springs, a suburb of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he attended and graduated as Valedictorian from Charles Page High School in 2003. He attended Oklahoma State University and graduated in 2009 with two B.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from the College of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology with focuses in Mathematics and Business Management. During his Senior year (2008-2009) at Oklahoma State University, he co-led Team Black, an engineering team of 15 students, that placed first in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Design/Build/Fly competition, hosted in Tucson, Arizona.

Professional career

Starting in 2006, he served as a project engineering manager for BarDyne, Inc., a fluid power engineering and consultant firm based in Stillwater, OK that originated from the Fluid Power Research Center (Oklahoma State University). During this time, he worked with organizations that spanned multiple industries, to include Walt Disney Imagineering, supporting their California Screamin' roller coaster in Anaheim, CA, and General Dynamics Amphibious Systems in Woodbridge, VA on the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program, developed for the United States Marine Corps.

In 2009, Stroup relocated to Washington, D.C. to serve as a subject-matter expert (SME) defense contractor for the Department of Defense CBRN defense portfolio, specifically on aerospace platform integration efforts, to include the Joint Strike Fighter program. Mid 2011 he joined the Department of Defense civilian workforce through an insourcing initiative, where his roles and responsibilities shifted towards supporting the military medical community and the development of vaccines and drugs as medical countermeasures for the United States Armed Forces. His final position was an Informatics SME and Integration Lead on a White House initiative called Biosurveillance. In June 2014 and until January 2015, Stroup became a co-founder for MegaBots, Inc. where he focused on fluid power design, fabrication, and business development and operations.

Stroup serves as the CEO and co-founder of an internet security tech startup called CommonKey that provides a cloud-based identity and access management solution for small and medium enterprises through a software as a service management dashboard paired with a browser extension that provides single sign-on functionality. The company was initially formed late 2012 and is currently located in New York City, NY and participated in the sixth class of the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator program that graduated with ten other NYC based startups in April 2014.

In addition to CommonKey, Stroup serves as the Director of Product for the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows, which is a competitive fellowship program that pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate on solutions that aim to deliver significant results in condensed timelines (four to twelve months).

TV career

In 2013, Stroup appeared in the first season of Discovery Channel's reality TV series The Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius, an engineering competition consisting of 10 contestants from across the country, which aired from May to June 2013. Each week contestants were put to the test, competing against each other in two teams to design, build, and deliver solutions to difficult engineering problems. He survived 6 out of 8 episodes and was the 2nd most winning competitor. To promote the show he appeared in a series of interviews prior to and during the airing of the TV series

Philanthropic interests

Stroup, along with Corey Fleischer, another contestant and winner of The Big Brain Theory, and Jason Hardebeck founded the Baltimore Foundery in 2013, a nonprofit organization makerspace (ref hackerspace) that focuses on providing access to industrial grade tools and education in the heart of Baltimore. Additionally, Stroup serves as a Trustee for the Awesome Foundation, which provide small grants for projects to people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.