Jennifer Dyer

Jennifer L. Dyer is a technology-commercialization and innovation executive with more than 30 years of experience in tech transfer, licensing, and entrepreneurship. Earlier in her career she was Director of Technology Development at The Scripps Research Institute, where she helped build both licensing activity and corporate-sponsored research — supervising roughly 800 licensing negotiations (involving equity, royalties, and other terms), facilitating the formation of about 30 startup companies, managing 300+ research funding agreements, and developing major relationships with partners such as Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, and PPG. She then served as Senior Manager / Corporate Development Consultant at Life Technologies Corporation (now Thermo Fisher Scientific), leading negotiation strategy and key licensing deals.

In March 2013, USC appointed Dyer as Executive Director of the USC Stevens Center for Innovation, the university's central technology-transfer and commercialization office. In that role she led a team of about 30 people managing university-owned intellectual property arising from more than $900 million in annual research funding spanning medicine, engineering, the sciences, and the arts. She focused on expanding private-sector engagement, increasing invention disclosures and licensing, supporting faculty recruitment around translational research, and running programs like the annual Student Innovator Showcase (she remained ED through at least 2020, publicly representing the Center's licensing, patenting, and startup-formation work).

Overlapping with and following her USC Stevens tenure, Dyer served as Executive Director of the West Coast Consortium for Technology & Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP) — a pediatric-device accelerator anchored at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and USC (now co-anchored with Lurie Children's in Chicago) and funded by the FDA's Pediatric Device Consortia program. As ED she ran the operational and investment side of a consortium that provides non-dilutive grants and hands-on commercialization support to pediatric medtech startups. Her USC email and phone in the stub data trace to this Los Angeles USC/CHLA innovation-ecosystem work.

More recently, Dyer moved into government technology transfer: she is listed as Monitoring & Enforcement Team Lead in the NIH Office of Technology Transfer, where her profile still summarizes her USC Stevens, Scripps, and Life Technologies background and cites experience leading more than 1,500 IP-agreement negotiations.

• Deploys non-dilutive, seed-stage capital rather than traditional equity checks — CTIP's annual Catalyzing Pediatric Innovation (CPI) grants run $25,000–$50,000 to pediatric device projects "at any stage of development," open to startups, industry, and academia.
• Strong bias toward translational, IP-backed innovation: her career centers on turning university research and inventions into licensed products and spinout companies (medical devices, life sciences, deep tech).
• Deep pediatric-medtech specialization via CTIP — addressing the market-failure gap in devices designed specifically for children, an area under-served by conventional VC.
• Values commercialization readiness: regulatory pathway (FDA), IP position, prototyping/engineering feasibility, clinical-trial design, and follow-on grant strategy — CTIP provides support across exactly these dimensions.
• Her stated framing at USC emphasized celebrating and enabling inventors: *"…we want to recognize USC inventors and the technologies that were licensed or patented…"* and *"Each year, the teams competing in the Student Innovator Showcase impress us with their ingenuity. The Stevens Center is proud to host our annual Showcase to support innovation at USC."*