A Salute to Our Innovators
Editor's Note
April / May 2010
Volume 8 Number 2
The people who help make the national laboratories work—scientists, researchers, engineers—are all too often unsung. Their inventions generally take center stage unless or until some of those inventors are honored with, say, a Nobel prize or other prestigious award.
Innovators, which is what they are, possess the often uncanny talent of seeing things differently than other people. This trait, along with other characteristics like curiosity, ambition, courage and keen intelligence, are almost embedded in an innovator’s DNA. They are remarkable people and the reason why this country has long been the world’s center of innovation.
In this issue, we turn the spotlight on a dozen innovators who are doing fascinating and important work. They range from Paul Alivisatos, the new director of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, to Bart Raeymaekers who, armed with an MBA and a Ph.D. in engineering, is connecting the scientist with the commercial marketplace at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
If you want to know where new ideas are coming from these days, look inside.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 required the appointment of a technology transfer coordinator in the Department of Energy who, among other duties, would be the principal advisor to the energy secretary on matters relating to tech transfer and commercialization. Those other duties included overseeing the expenditure of allocated funds as well as “efforts to engage private sector entities, including venture capital companies.”
The act also stipulated the establishment of a “Technology Transfer Working Group,” considing of national lab representatives who would exchange information about tech transfer practices and “develop and disseminate to the public and prospective technology partners information about opportunities and procedures.”
Finally, the act called on the secretary to establish an “Energy Technology Commercialization Fund, using 0.9 percent of the amount made available” to DOE to be used to provide matching funds with private partners to “promote energy technologies for commercial purposes.”
Well, it took the previous administration more than two years to find a tech transfer coordinator, who happened to be the occupant of the office reserved for the under secretary for science and who did not seek out a Technology Transfer Working Group. All of that suggests that technology commercialization wasn’t a priority at DOE.
Steven Chu, the incumbent secretary, has other ideas. He cares about tech transfer. In an exclusive interview with Innovation (please see page 9), he said his objective is to put more incentives in place “to keep scientists and engineers from going off” in directions that veer away from the path of commercialization.” And his under secretary for science, Steve Koonin, in another exclusive interview (page 10), says that “tech transfer is very high on Secretary Chu’s agenda, formed by his experiences and his leadership of the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.”
And recently, Chu appointed a full-time tech transfer coordinator with her very own office, staff and funds to operate. She is Karina Edmonds, an aeronautical engineer who has been a key tech transfer executive at the California Institute of Technology for more than a decade.
Welcome aboard, Dr. Edmonds, and may your journey be smooth and successful.
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