Prof. Vishwanath Organizes “From Idea to Intellectual Property” Class

This semester, Prof. Sriram Vishwanath is organizing a new class titled "From Idea to Intellectual Property: The Road to Commercialization". The class brings together students to work on commercializing research in WNCG and other sections of Engineering and Natural Sciences at The University. The class currently has teams comprised of one Ph.D. student from Engineering/Sciences, one Law student and one Business student. Each team's end-goal is to develop a patent application and a commercialization plan for the technology. Prof. Andrew Dillon, an adjunct professor at UT, from the IP law firm Dillon and Yudell, LLP is instructing students on patent law prosecution, while multiple guest lecturers from both within and outside UT are contributing to the commercialization aspects of the class.

This class has come about thanks to the support of Austin Technology Incubator (Isaac Barchas and Bart Bohn), Office of Technology Commercialization at UT (Prof. Robert Peterson, Rick Friedman and Jitendra Jain), as well as the Austin IP Law Association, The Austin Entrepreneur Network and many others within the Austin community.

Prof. Steven Nichols (ME, former associate vice president of research), Prof. Tony Ambler (chairman, ECE), Prof. Eden Harrington (associate dean, Law) and Prof. Rob Adams (Business) and Prof. Ted Rappaport (ECE, former WNCG director) have played key roles in making this class possible.

The class is also receiving support from the deans of the Business, Engineering and Law schools.

Affiliates can participate in this class by mentoring the participating students and/or by guest lecturing in the class. Please contact Prof. Vishwanath at sriram@austin.utexas.edu for details.