Technology Transfer

Technology
Transfer’s Daryl Boudreaux retires

BY LINDSEY FIELDER
Rice News staff

As the director
of the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT), Daryl Boudreaux
has overseen all of the intellectual property at Rice for
the past five years. This job will now be passed on as Boudreaux
retires March 31.

Until he came
to Rice in 1998, only a few patents had been filed at the
university and no one was coordinating these efforts. Boudreaux’s
first order of business was to set up an efficient service
for professors and researchers to take their ideas and move
them into a valuable position as intellectual property.
“I’ve always placed [faculty ideas] first,”
Boudreaux said. “Our office provides a service they
don’t have the time or skills to do on their own.”

The OTT helps
inventors with their initial documentation — a disclosure
that describes the new technology, its authorship and assignment
of rights to Rice. A committee then decides if the idea
is an innovation Rice should protect. If it is deemed important,
the OTT handles the process for applying for patents, copyrights
and trademarks.

Boudreaux has
also been in charge of initiating marketing, seeking partners
to license the product and create new business ventures
to move the technology into the public.

Boudreaux put
the entire process into place. Once it was up and running,
the system helped faculty and researchers find a place for
their inventions. Since the office’s inception, 234
disclosures have been filed.

Boudreaux plans
to move back to Philadelphia to be closer to his family.
He will work with investors in two of the start-up companies
that have come from Rice patents filed. “Instead of
pushing things out the door [as I did here at Rice], I’ll
be going out to find opportunities for these investors,”
he said.

Thanks to his
experience with the OTT at Rice, Boudreaux has been elected
vice president of professional development of Association
of University Technology Managers, a rapidly growing group
that trains people to be technology transfer managers.

Boudreaux said
working at Rice “has been the most significant and
enjoyable career move I’ve made.” From the first
day to his last, he said the people he’s worked with
have made it that way. “I’ll miss it here very
much,” he said.