Industrial partnership and outreach

Partnering with Industry

The NYU MRSEC builds interactions with the corporate sector through existing and emerging relationships, and through active recruiting. The centralized inter-departmental Industrial Partners Program provides both a framework for consolidating existing industrial collaborations and also a unified point of contact for new industrial partners. The MRSEC leverages the considerable prior industrial experience of key investigators (Chaikin, Grier, Pine, Ward) in forging ties to industry. The Industrial Partnership Program fosters the MRSEC’s interactions with industry by offering two levels of corporate membership:

Level I: Industrial Partners

Level I: Industrial Partners collaborate with MRSEC investigators in non-proprietary, pre-competitive research, including appointments for visiting industrial scientists and access to MRSEC facilities and associated support staff. Each Industrial Partner appoints a representative to the MRSEC’s Industrial Advisory Board, which is chaired by Dr. Paul Horn, who was recently recruited to NYU from IBM, where he was Senior Vice President and Director of Worldwide Research. Industrial Partners are permitted to attend annual MRSEC meetings, which feature previews and highlights of MRSEC research through presentations by MRSEC graduate students and postdocs, as well as jointly organized topical workshops. In addition to providing early access to new discoveries, the annual meetings and research collaborations allow Industrial Partners to engage graduate students and postdocs who may be prospective employees. Recognizing that business conditions and policies continually change in the private sector, the membership plan remains flexible and responsive in order to accommodate a spectrum of large and small companies, their involvement ranging from simply knowledge gathering to active “hands-on” participation by visiting industrial scientists in collaborative research. This structure expands the collaborative culture of NYU and the MRSEC to the industrial arena, strengthening research in both the academic and industrial sectors while promoting synergistic interactions that are pivotal in the training of the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Industrial Partners contribute overhead-free membership fees, graded by company size, which provides the Center with unrestricted funds that will be allocated to research projects and administrative expenses, as determined by the Center Executive Committee. The annual membership fee is 0.03% of gross annual sales, with a minimum of $5,000 (to encourage participation by small companies) and a cap of $35,000 for large companies. To encourage enrollment, the MRSEC caps the membership rate, at $10,000 annually, for three years for founding partners that join during Year 1 of the Center. The Center Executive Committee reviews the membership terms on an annual basis to measure its effectiveness in recruiting and retaining industrial members. Companies that have expressed an interest in NYU MRSEC investigator research include Dupont, Unilever, ExxonMobil, Roche, Rhodia, L’Oréal, IBM, Toshiba, Johnson & Johnson, Solvay, 3M, and Haemonetics.

Level II: Sponsored Research Affiliates

Level II: Sponsored Research Affiliates are Level I members who also support research on a contractual basis that has well-defined goals and intellectual property agreements negotiated by the NYU Office of Industrial Liaison/Technology Transfer (Abram Goldfinger, Director). NYU’s research contracts with the industrial sector contain clearly defined clauses regarding review and clearance of manuscripts for publication that ensure MRSEC-related research proceeds unfettered and is published on a normal academic time frame. To encourage the involvement of companies in both levels of members, companies entering into a Level II affiliation with MRSEC investigators are offered a reduced Level I membership fee, at 75% of the standard rate.

Knowledge Transfer

The Directors, IRG Coordinators, and the Center Administrator share responsibility for coordinating the various elements of the Industrial Partnership Program, including company recruitment and retention, annual meetings, communications with industry, organization of industrial advisory committees, and the Visiting Scientist program. Knowledge transfer is typically achieved in the following ways:

• Developing intellectual property.
  In addition to creating value for MRSEC industrial partners, the process of transforming scientific research into intellectual property provides an outstanding training opportunity for students at all levels. Virtually all of the intellectual property developed by Center researchers features students as co-inventors, and occasionally as sole inventors. The NYU Office of Industrial Liaison provides consultancy services for identifying commercializable inventions and supports the full life cycle of each invention from drafting the initial disclosure to negotiating licensing agreements. Participating students develop real-world experience in technology transfer as well as close and valuable contacts with industrial researchers and managers.
  
  
• Annual meetings.
  Member companies convene annually at NYU, typically in May following the end of the spring semester. These meetings consist of technical presentations, a poster session, a formal meeting with the Industrial Advisory Board, and topical workshops. Students and postdocs from MRSEC groups give the technical presentations and posters, providing an ideal mechanism for direct knowledge sharing among the students, postdocs, and company scientists. This also serves to promote future connections between the students and the industrial sector, which creates a conduit to employment for MRSEC students interested seeking industrial positions. The meeting schedules, presentation titles and abstracts, and news highlights from the meetings are posted and archived on the MRSEC website.
  
  
• Industrial Partner Visiting Scientists.
  Member companies are invited to designate research staff members as Visiting Scientists. This requires submission of a research proposal by the Visiting Scientist, its endorsement by a faculty collaborator(s), and approval by the appropriate IRG coordinator. This program is an ideal vehicle for two-way knowledge transfer between the MRSEC and the industrial sector. The visit may be served continuously or spread over a one-year period. As part of their membership, members are permitted to assign a Visiting Scientist for up to three months at no extra charge. The MRSEC will expect an additional $10,000 from each company that assigns a Visiting Scientist to cover the cost of laboratory operations. If the company meets the criteria for a small company, the Executive Committee can approve the use of Seed funds for this purpose.
  
  
• Workshops and Short Courses.
  The MRSEC will offer workshops and short courses for companies, faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral associates on topics related to the expertise of the MRSEC investigators. Each IRG will organize at least one workshop at the annual meeting, beginning in Year 2. Including both academic and industrial speakers. We anticipate workshops in molecular tectonics for polyoligomeric design, polymer synthesis and characterization, force microscopy, DNA materials, optical tweezers, and colloidal photonics.
  
  
• Shared Collaborative Research.
  IRG and Seed funds may be used to match additional Industrial Partner contributions for up to two years of shared graduate student or postdoctoral support for non-proprietary research projects of mutual interest. The projects must be aligned with MRSEC research interests and must be germane to the graduate student’s thesis or the postdoc’s scientific interests. The intention of this is to facilitate the expansion of industry involvement in the Center. Students benefit from the first-hand knowledge gained through direct collaboration with industry, whereas the industrial partner benefits from a more close-knit collaboration with MRSEC faculty and cultivation of an emerging expert in the field. The Executive Committee reviews all proposals for shared collaborative research. Extension beyond the two-year term requires approval by the Executive Committee.

Industrial Outreach in New York City

The NYU MRSEC benefits from its investigators’ ongoing relationship with the New York Academy of Sciences, a membership-based non-profit organization that has been bringing researchers together with leaders of government, industry, and the public for nearly 200 years. As one of the country’s leading organizers of conferences and workshops at the interface between industry and academia, the Academy has more than 75 corporate partners who regularly attend meetings in downtown Manhattan. Chaikin, Grier, Pine, and Ward are members of the steering committee for a newly created Soft Materials Discussion Group, which convenes three meetings each academic year attended by academic and industrial scientists and engineers. The first meeting - Self-assembly: Nature to Nurture – was held November 7, 2007 moderated by Ward, with presentations by Grier, Joanna Aizenberg (Harvard University), and Virgil Percec (University of Pennsylvania). The remaining meetings for the 2007-2008 academic year are Molecular Tales of Granularity (January 23, 2008), with presentations by Chaikin, Bruno Hancock (Pfizer) and Mark Shattuck (City College of New York), followed by Smart Materials (April 9, 2008). MRSEC investigators play a substantial role in establishing the themes and content of these and future meetings. Beyond the immediate interactions these meetings generate, they also help to popularize and disseminate the Center’s research through the Academy’s publications, many of which have appeared as highlights in news sources such as Red Herring, C&E News and Small Times. The 2008-2009 program may be found at the NYAS Website.