Three UTEN technology management interns in Texas

1 Feb 2010

With the support of the FCT, three technology managers from Portuguese universities are participating in professional internships at university technology offices in Texas.

Carla Mascarenhas of the University de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro began her internship at the University of Texas System's South Texas Technology Management (STTM) on January 11, 2010.   During her two-month internship she will mainly work to increase her knowledge in international technology transfer licensing and negotiation.  It was decided together with STTM that her internship should focus on all TT procedures at STTM other than patenting because patenting is an area in which Carla has over six years experience.  Carla’s coordinators at STTM are John Fritz and Sean Thompson.  Sean was also the main mentor for Rita Remigio, University of Aveiro, during her Internship at STTM in Fall 2009.  Carla is initially working on the evaluation and validation of Invention Disclosure Forms as well as research on the state of the art of patent applications and technology marketing.  During her first weeks as an Intern at STTM, Carla has also worked on sending Non Confidential Descriptions to U.S.-based enterprises and has attended meetings with investigators and conference calls between researchers and companies.

Beyond her daily work at STTM, Carla also attended the Technology and Entrepreneurship Boot Camp held at the Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship (CITE) at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Boot Camp speakers included business, legal, governmental and academic representatives.  Carla is also conducting RapidScreen and MarketLook assessments with the assistance of Cliff Zintgraff (UTEN Manager Technology Development, UTEN Austin) on Portuguese technologies she brought with her from Alto Douro. She has scheduled three market-based interviews scheduled and has started to consider Texas-based companies that could be interested in these technologies.

On February 1, Alexandra Marques of the University of Algarve joined Carla as the second UTEN Intern at STTM.  Alexandra is being mentored by Dr. Christine Burke. 

Also on February 1, Filipe Castro of the University of Porto began his two-month internship at the UT Austin Office of Technology Commercialization.  Filipe’s internship will focus on learning more of UT OTC's methodologies and procedures that were introduced to him by Rick Friedman and Max Green during the Technology Licensing Workshop they gave at UPIN in December.

These internships follow up on previous intensive workshops and internships conducted by UTEN throughout 2009. For more information on UTEN's activities please see: http://utenportugal.org