Cambridge University, UK, is responding to the economic downturn with a renewed commitment to its innovation arm, Cambridge Enterprise, which is adding three new members of staff in a move to strengthen its existing technology transfer team. Gillian Davis joins as Technology Manager to the Physical Sciences team, while the Life Sciences team is being boosted by Amanda Wooding as a Technology Manager and Steven Suchting as a Technology Associate. All three are educated to PhD level or beyond.
“Despite the downturn, research-intensive universities will continue to produce ideas that create jobs,” said Shirley Jamieson at Cambridge Enterprise. “These new posts will help to provide the skills and capacity to help find the best route for the commercialisation of science emerging from the university.”
Amanda Wooding was previously Director of Business Development with Acambis, and her experience includes in- and out- licensing activities with both universities and companies. Steven Suchting has experience from the other side of tech transfer – his own doctoral results commercialised by Cancer Research Technology while at the University of Oxford before four years of postdoctoral studies at the Collège de France in Paris. Gillian Davis has extensive experience of research and development, as well as business management, in a wide range of hi-tech fields from liquid-crystal displays and optical fibre communications to digital signal-processing software for noise reduction and microfluidics.
Between them, the Life Science and Physical Science teams review over 120 new inventions a year and work closely with their inventors to determine the way of commercialising them. Cambridge Enterprise currently manages over 450 active agreements and 1,100 individual patents, representing 310 patent families, and adds around 45 new patents a year to its portfolio.
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