Posts Tagged: "Jennifer Gottwald"

Does the Patent Gender Gap Matter?

Why should we care about getting more women inventing? What does it matter? You don’t find more innovation by looking in places where you’re not likely to discover it. You’ll find innovation by researching and developing and we have several untapped sources of potential. Up until now there has been little or no real significant output on an entrepreneurial innovative level for female inventors, as well as with minority inventors. So I’m very interested in the types of programs that are going on at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and I’m very interested in the efforts to try and bring women into the entrepreneurial and innovative space because I think that’s where we can find creative, fresh ideas. So I think this is a very important initiative.

The Patent Gender Gap Goes Beyond Fewer Women in Math and Sciences

“[W]e are finding that when the schools that are starting to measure their invention disclosure and their patent filings, again with at least one woman represented, even when they control for the percentage of female faculty members within a given department, for instance, they’re still finding that yes, there are fewer women represented but those fewer women that are represented are not filing as many invention disclosures as their male counterparts. So while we do need to concentrate on changing the culture and on making sure that girls and women are encouraged within these fields, we also have to, I think, for the sake of our economy, concentrate on women who are in these fields and are working and make sure that they also know about the patent process and find that accessible to them.”

University Research Leads to Biofuel Breakthrough

Exciting new innovations being patented and licensed by American universities may provide some effective answers to issues that have been vexing biofuel developers for years. Wilkerson described the breakthrough in Science, explaining that poplars can be specifically designed for deconstruction. “Poplars are dense, easy to store, and the flourish on marginal lands not suitable for food crops, making them a non-competing and sustainable source of biofuel,” said Wilkerson. According to Jennifer Gottwald, a licensing manager with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the basic technology applied here to poplar trees could used in a variety of other plant life, even grasses.