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Building a Career in Tech Transfer: Insights from Dr. Megan Griffin

Building a Career in Tech Transfer: Insights from Dr. Megan Griffin

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 Megan Griffin holds a BS in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology from Michigan State University and obtained her PhD in Developmental and Molecular Biology from the University of Cincinnati. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan in 2020 and later was an U-M Innovation Partnerships fellow from 2020 to 2022. Megan is now the Assistant Director of Licensing at U-M Innovation Partnerships. In her role, she guides U-M innovators through the process of protecting their intellectual property and commercializing it through licensing to an interested company or creating a new startup venture. Connect with Megan on LinkedIn Resources U-M Innovation Partnerships miLEAD Consulting GroupNucleateNSF I-Corps program Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer Hello everyone and welcome to 'What's Up, Doc?', an initiative developed by the University of Michigan Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. 'What's Up, Doc?' is a professional development interview series created to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current U-M postdocs. You will hear from former U-M postdocs discuss their own postdoc experience and share advice on their experience transitioning into their career of choice. We hope you will get the answers you want and need to make an informed decision about your own career. I am Anne-Sophie Bohrer Maurinne Bonnet And I am Maurinne Bonnet. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Today, our guest is Doctor Megan Griffin, who completed her postdoc at the University of Michigan in 2020. Megan is now working at the University of Michigan Innovation Partnerships as an Assistant Director of licensing. Welcome, Megan, and thank you for joining us. Megan Griffin Thank you for having me. Maurinne Bonnet Hey, Megan, it's a pleasure to have you today. So as Anne-Sophie said, you are currently working at Innovation Partnerships, so for some, some of us who are not familiar with that, could you briefly tell us more about this office, what are its main missions, what what are you doing there? Megan Griffin Sure. Yeah. So Innovation Partnerships was recently rebranded, used to be the Office of Technology Transfer here at the University of Michigan. And we rebranded really to capture a wider array of things that we do. So we're sort of divided into 3 branches. I work with the licensing team, we have a ventures team and we have our corporate and foundation research alliances team. So collectively, all of these groups work closely together, and our overall mission is really to help faculty or students or staff, whoever at the university that has innovative research, get that research out to the public. So really our our core mission statement is that we want every piece of research at the University of Michigan have the opportunity to impact the world. So we do this by helping to protect intellectual property that can be in the form of patents or copyrights or, you know, sometimes we can license things without protection, and then we also will try to get it to the world, either through licensing that to companies, help people create their own startup companies, uhm connect people with funding resources, that's another thing we do. So we have a couple of internal translation funds that we manage that are meant to fund the gaps in research to get it to a point where it's ready to be commercialized. And we also have investment funds for creating startup ventures. Uhm, so it's kind of, you know, overall the overarching goal of our office. And if you want to know more about the specific branches, I can get into more detail. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Cool. Well, that's really interesting. Uhm, so clearly you're still somehow and somewhat involved with the science, uhm, but you're not at the bench anymore, you're not in the lab anymore. And so can you tell us a little bit about your background and really what led you to choose to pursue this career? Megan Griffin Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in life sciences, I got a PhD at the University of Cincinnati in molecular and developmental biology. As I was wrapping up my graduate career, I was starting to think about what I wanted to do overall and I hadn't really quite settled on a career path. That was the first time I heard of tech transfer and I thought" Huh, that sounds kind of interesting, let me find out more." So I met with the tech transfer office at the Children's Hospital where I was doing my research, and sort of found out more about the career, but at that point I was about to graduate, it was a little late to get involved with them, uhm, and they told me that, you know, some schools have these internship opportunities available that you might be able to do if you choose to do a postdoc or something like that or maybe you can directly apply. So I decided to do a postdoc to keep my options open, so to speak. I hadn't totally ruled out the traditional route of, uhm, you know, trying to get a professor position, uhm, but I was sort of leaning ...
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