Dartmouth Makes List of Top Universities for Patents

Dozens of engineering-related patents line a wall at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. (Photo by Katie Lenhart)

Many of the patents involved inventors from more than one school, and nine included inventors from Dartmouth Health, underscoring the benefits of Dartmouth's substantial interdisciplinary research and clinical collaborations.

One of the new patents, for "resonant coils with integrated capacitance," was based on inventions developed in the lab of Thayer professor Charles Sullivan along with then-postdoctoral researchers Phyo Aung Kyaw Th'19, and Aaron Stein, and has been licensed to Resonant Link, a startup working on powering devices wirelessly. The trio co-founded the company along with Grayson Zulauf '12 Th'13, who is Resonant's CEO.

Another new patent issued in 2023, for a rapid molecular sensor, formed the basis of a spin-out company, Nanopath, which is developing point-of-care diagnostics for women's health. Dartmouth Engineering professor John Zhang co-invented the technology and co-founded Nanopath with Amogha Tadimety Th'20 and Alison Burklund Th'21.

Dartmouth has made the NAI top 100 list in eight of the past 10 years, according to Kim Rosenfield, director of the Technology Transfer Office at Dartmouth. Rosenfield and her team help assess which patents have the potential to be developed into products or services that can be commercialized, what companies might be a good match, as well as negotiating and monitoring licensing agreements.

"Our primary mission is to get technology out of the lab and into the world where it can benefit society," says Eric Fossum, vice provost for entrepreneurship and tech transfer and a professor of engineering. "The second priority is to attract and retain top faculty. Dartmouth has generous policies designed to encourage translation of research and reward researchers for successful innovation. We license many of our patents to companies founded by the inventors."

"Fundamentally, the reason that Dartmouth is pursuing patents and intellectual property is to magnify the impact of our research in the world," says Dean Madden, vice provost for research and a professor of biochemistry and cell biology.

Madden notes that the NAI list is not adjusted for size, so Dartmouth's patent-per-faculty ratio compares favorably to much larger universities that recorded more patents.

"We're punching way above our weight," Madden says.

In another measure of Dartmouth's contributions, Madden points to the 2022 Nature Index normalized "patent influence metric," which examined how often institutions like Dartmouth have their research cited in patent applications. Dartmouth ranked second in the Ivy League and 23rd in the world.

"Dartmouth faculty, students, and postdocs use novel strategies to tackle fundamental scientific questions. That's a good recipe for high-impact research, and I think it's the reason our discoveries are showing up so frequently in patents worldwide," Madden says.