Welcome New Member of the OTL&IC Team

Jennifer Tsai joined the Office for Technology Licensing and Industry Collaboration (OTL&IC) in May 2011. As associate director for commercialization, Tsai develops strategies for bringing Tufts inventions into public use, and she is the OTL&IC contact for inbound and outbound marketing and communications. Tsai has an undergraduate background in molecular biology and biochemistry and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has strong marketing and management experience from positions with Corning Life Sciences and Athena Diagnostics (a division of Quest Diagnostics).

“I came from industry; I was working in marketing—a product manager at Athena—but I wanted to move into more of a business development role,” says Tsai. “I thought this was a good fit that took advantage of my marketing abilities but also my interest in an academic environment. Most of my experience before business school was in nonprofits, and it was always my goal to go back at some point.”

Tsai promotes Tufts discoveries to potential commercialization partners. She attends partnering conferences and presents Tufts technologies to industry representatives. She fosters and facilitates communication between those interested in licensing a Tufts technology and the technology’s inventors. For example, one of her current projects is to market silk technologies developed by biomedical engineering faculty members David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto. “Several startups have come out of the silk portfolio,” says Tsai. After talking to inventors about applications for technologies, Tsai looks into potential markets and industries for these applications and reaches out to industry representatives. When industry representatives contact inventors directly, she is brought in to present an overview of the portfolio.

Jennifer Tsai works to commercialize technologies developed on all three Tufts campuses. She can be reached at jennifer.tsai@tufts.edu or (617) 636-2473.

For more information on Tufts technologies, please go to http://techtransfer.tufts.edu.