The Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, laid the groundwork for requiring increased reporting from the recipients of federal research and development funds. However, it takes a multitude of entities across the federal government to further promote the Bayh-Dole policies and mission. The Technology Partnerships Office (TPO), in an effort to encourage greater compliance with the Bayh-Dole Act, ran the Partners Engaged in Extramural Reporting (PEER) prize competition to improve the reporting of federally funded inventions. The PEER competition called for submissions of innovative ideas on how to encourage and inform the development and execution of program activities and communications all revolving around Bayh-Dole compliance.
Out of the many creative entries, three submissions were selected as the winners. In first place was Rhonda Kivlin, an intellectual property administrator at Northeastern University. Her entry proposed designing a compliance wizard to guide users through reporting inventions, developing comprehensive training modules for compliance, and instituting a certification for completion of the training modules.
Rhonda grew up in Southern Illinois and graduated from University of Southern Indiana with a degree in communications/journalism. After graduating, she went on to work in fields ranging from public relations, administration, sales and finally landed in the world of technology transfer. Throughout her extensive work history, she built a strong technology transfer knowledge base and was eventually encouraged by the director of Northeastern’s Center for Research Innovation to apply for the intellectual property administrator position.
After joining up as Northeastern’s intellectual property administrator, Rhonda soon saw that the reporting of federally funded inventions was merely a check-the-box task. That wasn’t enough for her and she quickly wanted to discover the nuances of the “why” behind such a task. Rhonda devoted much of he ..
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