UTEK Corporation has appointed Jan Jaferian as senior vice president, the tech-transfer services firm said last week.
Jafrian will lead UTEK’s intellectual property licensing efforts, and will be responsible for managing the company’s client base. She previously served as president of Lucent Technologies’ intellectual property business. Prior to that, Jafrian was vice president of Xerox’s intellectual property operations. She has also served as executive director of technology licensing for Amoco. She holds a PhD in business administration from Harvard Business School.
The Energy Biosciences Institute, a newly established public-private research collaboration between BP, the University of California-Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has named Christopher Somerville as its director.
Somerville is a visiting scientist at LBNL and has been director of plant biology at the Carnegie Institution and professor of biological sciences at Stanford University since 1994. He will join the UC-Berkeley faculty as a professor of plant and microbial biology.
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a private law firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., last week said that it has appointed 13 new partners, including James Clessuras, Aaron Hendelman, and Anie Roche as partners in its intellectual property practice.
Clessuras is based in Washington, DC, and focuses on business transactions related to technology and IP rights in the IT, semiconductor, and life sciences industries. He holds a JD from Northwestern University School of Law.
Hendelman, based in Seattle, is an expert in trademarks, copyrights, and advertising law. He received his JD from the University of Texas Law School.
Roche is based in Palo Alto, and focuses on patent prosecution, strategic patent counseling, and IP due diligence in fields such as protein chemistry, pharmaceutical sciences, pharmacology, neuroscience, bioinformatics, and molecular biology. She holds a JD from the University of Minnesota Law School and a PhD in pharmacology and neuroscience from the University of Minnesota.
RNAi therapeutics company Alnylam last week named Donna Ward to the position of vice president, intellectual property. Concurrent with Ward’s hiring, Alnylam said that Robert Millman, former chief intellectual property counsel, is now a consultant for the company.
Ward joins Alnylam from the Elmore Patent Law Group, where she represented companies in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries and focused on strategic counseling and pharmaceutical lifecycle management. She also spent seven years at Isis Pharmaceuticals. Ward holds a JD from the Thomas Jefferson School of Law and a PhD from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine.
Douglas Edgeton has been selected as the new president of the Piedmont Triad Research Park in Winston-Salem, NC.
Edgeton currently serves as executive vice president and COO of Wake Forest University Health Sciences.