DOE, Finally, Has a Tech Transfer Coordinator

April / May 2010 Volume 8 Number 2

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Although Congress stipulated in 2005 legislation that the Department of Energy “shall appoint a technology transfer coordinator to the the principal advisor to the secretary on all matters relating to technology transfer and commercialization,” the previous administration dithered for several years until the under secretary for science was named to the post, despite having a full-time job as under secretary for science.
It took the current administration about a year to name its own tech transfer manager. She is Karina Edmonds, an aeronautical engineer who had been director of Jet Propulsion Laboratory Technology Transfer at the California Institute of Technology.

In that role she was responsible for licensing technologies developed at both JPL and Caltech to industry and startups, managing the JPL patent portfolio and assisting startups.

“I am pleased to have Karina join our team” said DOE Secretary Steven Chu in making the announcement. “Having Karina oversee a coordinated, strategic effort on behalf of the department will help increase the rate of successful technology transfers, creating clean energy jobs and providing more solutions to our energy challenges.”

She’ll have more than enough to do. In 2009 the Government Accountability Office observed in a report to Congress that “DOE cannot determine if laboratories’ effectiveness in transferring technologies outside DOE because it has not yet established department-wide goals for technology transfer and lacks reliable performance data….

“GAO is recommending a number of actions, including that DOE articulate departmental priorities and a definition for technology transfer, improve its performance data and ensure that laboratories have sufficient expertise and a systematic approach for identifying commercially promising technologies.”