To catch up with other universities, Cal State Northridge is setting up a technology transfer program to commercialize research done by faculty and students. The university has hired Crist Khachikian, a former Cal State Los Angeles engineering professor with degrees from UCLA and MIT, to head the initiative, which is still in its infancy. The university needs to hire staff, establish policies, educate faculty and, of course, get more research funding. But there is a foundation to build on: The school brings in about $32 million in outside research dollars a year. However, Khachikian said it may take four to five years just to get to the point of licensing out any technology – and 10 years or more before any inventions generate money. “This is not an overnight thing,” he said. CSUN enters into tech transfer at a time when universities are seeing an increase in the number of patents applied for, licenses being executed and start-ups being formed. In a survey of its membership, the Association of University Technology Managers found that in the 2012 fiscal year – the most recent data available from the Deerfield, Ill. nonprofit – total license income rose nearly 7 percent to $2.6 billion. The survey also showed that 705 startup companies were formed that fiscal year, an increase of 5.1 percent. Locally, CSUN is up against three schools that are leaders in tech transfer: UCLA, California Institute of Technology and USC, which have been successful in commercializing research, including in fields such as medical devices, solar power, nanotechnology, polymer materials and wireless communications. Jennifer Dyer, executive director of USC Stevens Center for Innovation, which handles tech transfer at the university, said there is no doubt Northridge has its work cut out. She noted there are 2,000 research universities nationwide elbowing each other for funding. “When you are starting out you are an unknown and industry does not know the quality of your science,” Dyer said. “You have to build a reputation and compete against everyone doing it for 30 years.” Making headway The growth of technology transfer programs stems from the 1980 passage by Congress of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to commercialize and retain funds from federally funded research. “There was a huge wave of establishing tech transfer offices that sped up in the 1980s because of that act,” said Hannah Dvorak-Carbone, associate director of Cal Tech’s transfer office. However, the 23-campus California State University system was slow to move into tech transfer due to its historic mission laid out in the 1960 state master plan for higher education. The plan focused the system on educating students and awarding bachelor degrees, rather than conducting research. Successful tech transfer stems from groundbreaking research done by faculty in concert with doctoral candidates. Few schools in the Cal State system offer doctorates, but faculty research is growing – though it has a long way to go. CSU schools receive about $580 million in research grants and contracts, most of it coming from the federal government. By comparison, UCLA, one of the nation’s top research schools, received $972 million from federal, state and other sources alone in fiscal 2014, while the entire University of California system received about $4.1 billion. Cal Tech has a current research budget of $300 million, not including Jet Propulsion Laboratory funded by NASA. CSUN President Dianne Harrison said the university decided to get into tech transfer because it is a logical spinoff from efforts to increase research and other scholarly activities. CSUN engages in mostly applied research that has real, immediate results versus the basic research done in a lab setting that larger Southern California schools conduct, she said. Still, any research helps CSUN faculty stay on the cutting edge in their discipline. “When you appreciate the size of the (school) and how the faculty and students and graduates can drive the regional economy forward, this is what we can do to create new businesses and new economic opportunities for this area,” Harrison said. The school has 1,900 faculty and about 38,300 undergraduate and graduate students. Khachikian was hired in August 2013, after spending 14 years at Cal State Los Angeles as a professor in civil engineering, director of the Center of Energy and Sustainability and director of research in engineering. He has degrees in civil engineering from UCLA and MIT. At CSUN, he oversees both the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects, and Graduate Studies, with a total staff of 20 employees and a budget of $5 million. As a first step, he has been visiting UCLA, Cal Tech, Cal Poly Pomona and other universities to learn how their programs operate. “We are engaging at any level to understand how this applies to big, small and new campuses,” Khachikian said. The office is specifically familiarizing itself with federal regulations under the Bayh-Dole Act, working with attorneys on the university’s staff experienced in patent law and meeting with deans of colleges and departments to set up innovation centers and entrepreneurship programs. They will build on those that already exist in the engineering and computer sciences curriculum. Dvorak-Carbone stressed the importance of building awareness of a tech transfer office on campus and showing how it can assist faculty researchers. The flipside is that faculty need to make themselves and their research known by publishing papers or speaking at conferences. “The (technology transfer office) will have to take a more active marketing approach and shop technology around to industry at conferences,” Dvorak-Carbone said. Khachikian expects to bring two compliance officers on board, with one already undergoing training on federal regulations. One of the first key issues will be establishing a policy that will determine revenue distribution among the university and faculty researchers. “That will go through the normal university channels for approval,” Khachikian said. Potential projects Steve Sereboff, an attorney in the Westlake Village office of SoCal IP Law Group LLP, who represents both university and tech company clients, said that setting up licensing agreements, requires a lot of compromise so the universities and the companies receiving the license are both satisfied. “We tend to spend a fair amount of time negotiating,” said Sereboff, who has represented schools in the UC system, the University of Utah and MIT. Khachikian foresees the College of Engineering and Computer Science generating the first projects that can be commercialized, considering its interest in robotics and mobile power stations. Physicists working with new types of materials could also contribute, he added. And in the College of Education there is a faculty member developing a product to improve how middle school and high school students learn math. “He is working with (Los Angeles Unified School District) teachers and math educators so it will be a robust platform,” Khachikian said. An additional partner to the team will be the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, based just south of downtown. It was founded by the city in 2011 with a mission to accelerate the growth of green tech companies and currently has a portfolio of 16 startups. Erik Steeb, the incubator’s vice president of programs, said the organization is establishing its first satellite office at CSUN. It will be located in trailers on the north end of campus before moving to a permanent home just off campus. “The university wanted it to be seen as a community effort and not just a campus effort,” he said. While the tech transfer office will handle any paperwork in establishing relations between the university and any startup, the incubator will help the startup access executive coaches, mentors and investors. However, Sereboff is not totally convinced that the school, given its limited research dollars, should focus on tech transfer. At this stage, he believes attention should go to garnering more research funding. “The Cal State system will look more favorably upon successes in research sponsorship than in getting stock in startups,” he said. Khachikian said it is a given the university needs more research funding and there is a goal to grow the current $32 million research budget to $50 million within 10 years. But he disagrees that tech transfer cannot be pursued simultaneously. “It is good for (faculty and students) to know that what they do in the lab has relevance outside the campus,” he said. “We feel a moral obligation to do something more than just do research – translate it into things for the common good.”