 Hello, good morning. First of all, thanks to our hosts and thanks for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here and to learn from this great grouping across different disciplines and areas about universities and patent law. I definitely have thoughts and I look forward to the discussion on whether it be biotechnology patents and their abstractness and their patentability even after myriad and the Mayo two-step and whatnot, but for my talk, for my formal remarks, I thought I would do something since we're going to hear from people at MIT and who've been at Stanford. I thought I would talk about universities that are not at kind of the MITs or Stanford's and what they are doing with patents. So I thought I'd talk about what Boston College, where I work, what its approach is with technology licensing and so forth. So, importantly, one of the things that makes Boston College very different than Harvard or Stanford and MIT or others is we have no medical school and we have no engineering department. So we're much more of a liberal arts university and what do patents look like to the liberal arts university? We do have, you know, good departments in chemistry and biology and computer science, but still not just a very different focus, I would say, than some of these other places. So BC has four main goals when it comes to thinking about technology transfer, thinking about innovation and patentable innovation. The first goal is just to push technology out into the world, push out what we're doing and share it with the world. Sometimes that means monetizing it and sometimes that's very exciting and, you know, the universities don't tend to look a scant at bringing in money. Other times it's, though, a free or reduced price depending on how it fits with the mission and I'll give an example of that in a bit. The second goal is to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship amongst our students and our faculty. Boston College does have a quite well-regarded undergraduate business school and a good graduate business school, but the undergraduate business school is particularly well-regarded. And so there's a sense of wanting to encourage that kind of innovation and entrepreneurialism. Amongst our students. And so when policy setting, when coming at the kind of duties of especially the technology transfer office, we keep that in mind. The third, closely related, is an educational goal and I'll talk about how there's some educational tie-in. And fourth, and hopefully much more minor, but I think something worth talking about is kind of keeping stakeholders and especially important faculty members, PIs, happy and how sometimes that comes into play in the office. So how does Boston College accomplish these four goals? Well, when it comes to pushing technology out into the world, that's often, but not always done through patents, but often is done through at least looking at patents. So I'll talk first about patenting and licensing. The approach that Boston College takes, and I should say something about our technology licensing office, so, or we call it the tech transfer office, until five years ago, this was a cost center at Boston College. For the last five years, it's been modestly profitable. Since we hired a director who was a patent agent for ten years and can do a lot of our patent work, at least provisionals in-house, and he now has a staff of two full-time people, another of whom is a patent agent and one is a PhD. So Jason Nguyen is in charge of our office there, and he's been very energetic about pushing our technology out there, and the way that's generally done is when an inventor comes and looks like there's something with promising potential, filing a provisional patent and then going and trying to find out if someone is willing to license it. And then if someone is, then letting, effectively letting the licensee pay for the patent prosecution is kind of the ideal, I think, approach there. There, in some cases, of course, they'll patent on their own and license, but that's a big cost for a relatively small office like we have at BC, and so there's really a focus on licensing early, assessing whether there's interest early, and focusing there, and for the most part, not always, but for the most part, if there's not at that point, potentially letting, you know, not not falling up on the rest of the patent filing. Sometimes we'll then, if the inventor is still interested in it, BC will grant all of the rights, assign all of the rights then to the individual inventor, and let her or him do, you know, do as she will with it, and this with students as well. Everybody at BC signs, well, almost everybody at BC signs an agreement saying that the university has the rights to their inventions, so faculty, grad students, etc. The exception is that our undergraduate students do not, in anything they invent, even using university resources are considered theirs. Sometimes they'll do deals in which they'll bring on some more university resources, and that can change, but that leads into the second way that BC tries to push out technology, and that's to spin it off into startups. So as part of the entrepreneurial focus, there's an interest in spinning some of this out into startups, either at the provisional level, or if the patent prosecution is ongoing, whether that be faculty members, faculty and students, graduate students, sometimes undergraduate students, on their own. So, and there's an interest in the office to bringing together people who can benefit each other. So bringing together people within the university community who might want to be involved in the startup that's spent, spun off. I already mentioned giving the rights to the PI and that sort of thing. So there's two types of kind of licensing that BC does. One is just trying to monetize the invention, thinking it's going to be useful to the market. Generally, with an exclusive license, you know, just go ahead and let someone have it, and it's going to be their problem, and it's kind of off of the managing of it is out of the technology transfer office. The other is public good. So a team of computer scientists at Boston College came up with an invention that's now been called the Eagle Eye. And what this does is by putting electrodes around the eye of someone who's paralyzed, it can track eye movements so that when people look at a screen, it can effectively make their eye movements the mouse and the clicking. You may have even seen this reported in the news. It's gotten some pretty good news coverage. And so BC spun that off, or it didn't spin it off, but licensed it to a non-profit who agreed to make the technology available as part of its non-profit mission, and it wasn't for zero fee, but it was a very, very low fee to try to just kind of do public good through that. This is a technology that might be commercializable on its own, but in certain cases BC sees its mission, its social justice mission as being that it should just spin this sort of stuff out. That also leads me to another point, which I think is important, and that's the importance of culture at universities. So overall BC's goal is for the tech transfer office to make some money, but to make some money so it's not a big cost center in pushing our innovations out into the world. If individual inventors and groups make some money off of that as well, that's the good. You know, it's motivation. BC's standard deal is that the inventor gets a third, and BC takes the other two-thirds, a third for the department, a third for the university. So that's the goal. Now, I don't think anyone would be unhappy if the billion-dollar invention comes along and things transform, but that's really not what we're looking for or see likely right now. So I think the importance of situation, context, and culture is worth thinking about. BC's been approached by a number of patent aggregators and has always said no because of a cultural and values kind of idea of not wanting to be involved in that sort of monetizing. Generally after initial licensing or initial attempt to commercialize the invention, that's about it as far as what BC does. There are some example or exceptions. So when a startup fails, sometimes the license deal will then make the tech come back to BC. At that point, try to relicense it. So in at least one or two occasions when that's happened, then doing just a search has revealed people who seem to be practicing the patent, and then there's been some letter writing and engaging with licensing attempts with those people. But of course, because litigation is so expensive and most a lot of the innovation coming out of BC is not going to be the huge upside. The attempt at BC is really to, I shouldn't say it's too loudly, right? But to avoid litigation, right? If I say we'll never litigate, then that just destroyed our bargaining position. But there it is. And I should also, of course, say that I'm in the law school and I'm talking with people and we're involved, but I don't speak for, of course, the university as policy. The last thing I'll say, because I'm pretty much out of time, is we have the educational goals. So we're trying to work between the law school, the business school, and our tech transfers office to have students involved in all those sort of things. So whether it be entrepreneurship and business model competitions where we actually bring in the tech transfer office to help give advice and whatnot to the business school students, to the law students. We're trying to innovate and integrate much more. We've got a new program on innovation and entrepreneurship at the law school and we're trying to tie that in with what the B school already has in the tech transfer office. So that's that's one kind of view of how that works at a school like BC. So I look forward to the rest of the discussion. Thanks.