Resources

• U-M Innovation Partnerships
• miLEAD Consulting Group
• Nucleate
• NSF I-Corps program

Transcript

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Hello everyone and welcome to ‘What’s Up, Doc?’, an initiative developed by the University of Michigan Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. ‘What’s Up, Doc?’ is a professional development interview series created to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current U-M postdocs. You will hear from former U-M postdocs discuss their own postdoc experience and share advice on their experience transitioning into their career of choice. We hope you will get the answers you want and need to make an informed decision about your own career.

I am Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Maurinne Bonnet

And I am Maurinne Bonnet.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Today, our guest is Doctor Megan Griffin, who completed her postdoc at the University of Michigan in 2020. Megan is now working at the University of Michigan Innovation Partnerships as an Assistant Director of licensing.

Welcome, Megan, and thank you for joining us.

Megan Griffin

Thank you for having me.

Maurinne Bonnet

Hey, Megan, it’s a pleasure to have you today. So as Anne-Sophie said, you are currently working at Innovation Partnerships, so for some, some of us who are not familiar with that, could you briefly tell us more about this office, what are its main missions, what what are you doing there?

Megan Griffin

Sure. Yeah. So Innovation Partnerships was recently rebranded, used to be the Office of Technology Transfer here at the University of Michigan. And we rebranded really to capture a wider array of things that we do. So we’re sort of divided into 3 branches. I work with the licensing team, we have a ventures team and we have our corporate and foundation research alliances team. So collectively, all of these groups work closely together, and our overall mission is really to help faculty or students or staff, whoever at the university that has innovative research, get that research out to the public. So really our our core mission statement is that we want every piece of research at the University of Michigan have the opportunity to impact the world. So we do this by helping to protect intellectual property that can be in the form of patents or copyrights or, you know, sometimes we can license things without protection, and then we also will try to get it to the world, either through licensing that to companies, help people create their own startup companies, uhm connect people with funding resources, that’s another thing we do. So we have a couple of internal translation funds that we manage that are meant to fund the gaps in research to get it to a point where it’s ready to be commercialized. And we also have investment funds for creating startup ventures. Uhm, so it’s kind of, you know, overall the overarching goal of our office. And if you want to know more about the specific branches, I can get into more detail.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Cool. Well, that’s really interesting. Uhm, so clearly you’re still somehow and somewhat involved with the science, uhm, but you’re not at the bench anymore, you’re not in the lab anymore. And so can you tell us a little bit about your background and really what led you to choose to pursue this career?

Megan Griffin

Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in life sciences, I got a PhD at the University of Cincinnati in molecular and developmental biology. As I was wrapping up my graduate career, I was starting to think about what I wanted to do overall and I hadn’t really quite settled on a career path. That was the first time I heard of tech transfer and I thought” Huh, that sounds kind of interesting, let me find out more.” So I met with the tech transfer office at the Children’s Hospital where I was doing my research, and sort of found out more about the career, but at that point I was about to graduate, it was a little late to get involved with them, uhm, and they told me that, you know, some schools have these internship opportunities available that you might be able to do if you choose to do a postdoc or something like that or maybe you can directly apply. So I decided to do a postdoc to keep my options open, so to speak. I hadn’t totally ruled out the traditional route of, uhm, you know, trying to get a professor position, uhm, but I was sort of leaning against it, so I decided to take a postdoc opportunity here with University of Michigan. And I knew going in that the university had this internship opportunity for graduate students and postdocs with what was then the Office of tech transfer. Uhm, so I started my postdoc and sort of that knowledge in the back of my mind and kept my eyes and ears open for any postings or any knowledge about this internship opportunity. So about a year into my postdoc, I got an e-mail, uhm, I forget who it came from, probably the, you know, postdoc affairs, about different opportunities and saw that they were hiring interns, so I applied and was fortunate enough to get that position. Uhm, so I did that for the rest of the duration of my postdoc, uhm, concurrent with that position. So this was like a 10 hour a week remote position, uhm, and got me some exposure to this career path. I really enjoyed doing it, decided that I wouldn’t be sad if I never looked at a pipette again, uhm, as much as I love bench research, I was kind of ready to step away. But I didn’t want to lose, like you mentioned, this is related to science, I, I didn’t want to lose that, you know, learning about cutting edge research and I really liked everything that academia had to offer, uhm, so this seemed like a good fit for me, where I get to learn about all the exciting research, use my training to sort of decipher what that knowledge means, uhm, but then sort of meet the business arm, uhm, and try to translate that research into a commercial product or, you know, in, in my sweet spot of my background in life sciences, uhm, I spent a lot in the area of therapeutics, so drug development, how can we treat patients better with a variety of diseases.

Maurinne Bonnet

So we’ll come back later with Anne-Sophie about like your day-to-day life, and I think what, what I’m really curious about is so when you decided to join the U of M, is it because you knew there would be this fellowship or you actually decide to join the university to join a specific lab?

Megan Griffin

Yeah, so it was a combination of things. Uhm, knowing that the fellowship existed definitely helped my decision, uhm, but I, I was mostly focused on finding a postdoc that fit my career interests, as well as, you know, fit my personal life. So I didn’t, I applied for multiple postdocs, uhm, and some of my other interviews, I asked about tech transfer and if there were any opportunities there to, you know, volunteer, shadow, get involved with the office, just to explore the career. And, you know, there’s a variety of levels of things that other universities, but I, I grew, I was born and raised, well I wasn’t born here, but I was raised in Michigan and I have family nearby, so that helped in my decision to come back to Michigan for a postdoc. And the lab that I joined, uhm, was Jordan Schaefer’s lab with Michigan Medicine and studied thrombosis. My graduate work was in blood vessel development, so it was sort of an adjacent area. Uhm, I did my graduate work with zebrafish as a model organism and joined the zebrafish lab here, uhm, so it was a good fit in a lot of ways: fit my area of interest for research, fit my geographically preferred location and I knew that this fellowship existed.

Maurinne Bonnet

That makes a lot of sense, yeah. Sounds like it was a good decision.

Megan Griffin

Yeah!

Maurinne Bonnet

So, uhm, you, you said that you got this part-time fellowship that takes you up to, like, 10 hours per week. So, uhm, how did you kind of manage the logistics between your bench work, you know, fulfilling your duty as a postdoc, and also working at the Innovation Partnership office? And did your PI support you in that?

Megan Griffin

Yeah. So, uhm, my PI was very supportive in order to have additional work because it is a paid internship, you have to have approval, I think as a graduate student and perhaps with a postdoc. So they just ask that your PI sign this letter of support, that they know you’re doing this, and they’re, they’re okay with it. Uhm, and fortunately, my PI was very supportive, I, you know, came to him and said “There’s this opportunity, I’m interested in this as a career. This will only take up to 10 hours a week. I understand that I need to get my research done in the lab as well. And you know, I won’t, I’ll make sure it doesn’t interfere.” and he was very on board with “Oh yeah, you should follow your career interests. The career development is very important. If you’re interested in this happy to support you, uhm, trying it.” So that was sort of step one. And then in terms of balancing the workload, the part time fellows help with sort of invention intake analysis, so when an invention comes to our office, we get this sort of one-pager form that summarizes what the invention is, and we have a handful of fellows with a variety of backgrounds. So, uhm, somebody in my role, a licensing manager, will request a fellows report and once that report is requested, it gets assigned to a fellow based on their area. That fellow then has one week to complete this templated report and the report has sections that talk about the background of the invention and, you know, just sort of summarizing the background knowledge in the field, uhm, market analysis – who would use it, what competitive products are, or what companies might want to use it – uhm, any market statistics you can find. And then it has a few other sections: one is to sort of to write an abstract about the technology, uhm, and then one that is most useful for most people in our office is this priority section. We asked the fellows to look into what intellectual property might exist, and that can be in the form of patents or papers or anything they can find online. Uhm, and they sort of compile all this data into this templated report and e-mail it back to the manager of the fellows’ program. So all that is a lot of work, but all you need is a computer and an internet connection so it can be done anywhere, anytime. It was always a remote position even before COVID, uhm, so it was easy to sort of squeeze into my evenings, or I could do a little bit on the weekend, or if I had, you know a really long experiment and not much other stuff going on in the lab that day, I can even work on it and, you know, during my quote-unquote “normal business hours” since we all know that postdocs aren’t traditional, you know, 9-to-5 jobs (laughs). Uhm, so and these reports were easiest to get done in chunks of time so I didn’t need 10 hours all at once to do it, but it was helpful if I had at least one or two hours to get a chunk of work done. So it was not too hard to manage, uhm, and it was the nature of the internship is, uhm, it did not necessarily have an assignment every single week. It just depended on what came into our office, so I might have an assignment three weeks in a row and then I might not have one for a couple of weeks, uhm, so I didn’t have to devote an extra 10 hours every single week, it just sort of depended on what the work, workload was like.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

And, and I assume then that anyway they were very mindful in not assigning you several projects at once, right?

Megan Griffin

Correct!

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Like mindful of your time and also of your abilities, right, you’re just learning.

Megan Griffin

Yeah, yeah. We would only ever get one assignment at a time, and that single report was meant to take 8 to 10 hours of time. Uhm, and the project, you know, we understand that people, life, life happens, right, uhm, so our fellows were always free to request weeks off, like “Hey, I’m going on vacation, please don’t assign me this week”

Maurinne Bonnet

Uh-huh.

Megan Griffin

Or “I’m really busy in lab, can you please not assign me something for one or two weeks” and, as long as that wasn’t, you know, super frequent.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Every week.

Megan Griffin

Yeah, it’s pretty accommodating to request that.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

How long did this, so we’re talking, you initially said internship and now we talk about fellowship. Are you mentioning talking about the same thing and how long was the internship for?

Megan Griffin

So yeah. That’s a great question. So sort of using them interchangeably, uhm, so I guess this is probably would be more of like the internship uhm, that I did.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Okay.

Megan Griffin

And this was part time, so I did this until I, uhm, ended my postdoc. So we asked the part time, so we called them part time fellows, so we asked our part-time fellows to commit at least one year to the program, and that’s just because there’s some time and investment in training and things like that. We don’t expect these fellows to come in knowing how to do patent searches and stuff like that, so there’s a little bit of training. Uhm, but you’re welcome to stay for as long as it makes sense, uhm, and for me, I enjoyed it, I wanted my career to move towards that direction, so I started about a year into my postdoc, I was postdoc for four years, so I did this for about 3.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Cool.

Megan Griffin

And then the, from there I moved to a full-time fellowship, still with our office. So that’s where I sort, might be confusing the two (laughs). So I did this part-time fellowship, moved to a full-time fellowship and that was where my postdoc ended.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Okay, cool! That’s great. After your fellowship with Innovation Partnerships, then you were hired and you started there as a licensing manager and now you’re an assistant director of licensing. So can you explain really what this initial role was about? Uhm, what was the average day in the job like? But also, how different it was from the fellowship you were just coming off?

Megan Griffin

Yeah. So maybe I’ll take one step back. So I explained there is this part-time fellowship and then full-time fellowship. So I’ll just briefly mention in the full-time fellowship, uhm, that was kind of similar to the part-time role, uhm, and that I still did a lot of these fellows reports, but I was full-time with our office. Uhm, when I started it was 2 weeks before COVID, so we went remote of course, and then we came back hybrid and in that full-time fellowship, uhm, the responsibilities are a bit more expanded. So our full time Fellows will get to sit in on meetings with patent lawyers, with faculty, with our internal meetings and sort of just learn about more aspects of the job, and they might be asked to do more specialized projects based on who needs help with what. Uhm, so I did the full-time fellowship for two years, uhm, it was from 2020 to 2022, I was part of our inaugural group of full-time Fellows, so a new program when I joined. We’re still doing it, uhm, we have about three fellows at a time in life sciences, medical sciences, depends on needs. I did end up with a full-time position with our office, that was not a guarantee. It just sort of depended on what positions were available. So I’m, uhm, assistant director of licensing is my official title, and I work with the therapeutics team. So what that means is that my role is to help people at the university, uhm, get their inventions properly protected, the intellectual property, and also try to find licensees for their technologies or help them create their companies. So there’s two main buckets of things I do, one it deals with intellectual property protection, one deals with licensing. So functionally, what this job entails is, uhm, every day is a little bit different. So, uhm, my day is managing my portfolio of technologies, so I get faculty assigned to me that are in my field and we sort of work with repeat customers so to speak. So I will work with the same faculty whenever they submit something into our office, just because that, you know, you’re sort of familiar with their background as a whole. So some technologies will get an invention submitted to our office, and it’s a really cool idea, but it’s a little bit early, so some things are very active. Other things are, uhm, you know, this is ready, let’s talk to a patent attorney, let’s get a patent filed on this as soon as possible, so I’ll coordinate those meetings and give approval to the patent attorney who actually writes drafts, but work with the faculty to approve that draft and get things filed. Other things are even more mature, where we’ve already gone through this whole process and there, it’s ready, and it’s ready to exit the university. So then I will try to help find a licensee, whether that is, uhm “Hey, we have a connection at this company, let me reach out to my contact” or more frequently, the faculty will come with the connection of their own. So I’ll help set up meetings, get non-disclosure agreements in place so they can talk more freely about the science and then if things are going really well, help negotiate licensing deals so, uhm, you know sort of where the business side comes into play. I’ll, I’ll work with whoever the licensee is on financial terms and legal terms and things like that until we come to a, an agreement and they can license the technology out to a company, uhm, or if your faculty is like “I really want to start a company on this, I think that would be super cool” then I’ll connect them to our ventures team, uhm, and help them get, gear them towards the correct resources to get them launched. So it’s still kind of a broad overview, it’s it’s my day, is very variable. It just depends on what’s going on. So it’s, uhm, it’s hard to describe the typical day. But it it keeps things interesting. I like it.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Yeah, it sounds very interesting. And it sounds like you were working with really a broad and very various array of people who have, like, very different backgrounds, very different interests in getting the project to the finish line. So yeah, that’s really cool.

Megan Griffin

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Maurinne Bonnet

OK, so that that might be actually challenging to like jump in meetings with like scientists, lawyers and you know manage the fellows. So I guess that the next question we have for you would be what would you say are two or the three greatest challenges you have faced in this position and, uhm, if you can also tell us about your biggest reward in your position, whatever this is, that you, you know, keep waking up every day to go to work.

Megan Griffin

Sure. Yeah. So you sort of alluded to one of them already, but I think one of the greatest challenges is just, uhm, self-organization so you know like we sort of talked about, there’s a lot of different parts of this job, a lot of different technologies, uhm, and just making sure that I stay on top of what needs to get done when, prioritize correctly and not let things slip through the cracks because that, that can happen easily. Uhm, and then another challenge., fortunately, most everyone that I talked to has a good demeanor and we can communicate effectively and talk about what to do with things, but occasionally you have to give bad news, you know, like this your project is really cool and we know you know people work so hard on things. It’s, it’s their baby, so to speak, and I have to say “This patent is almost the same thing, this is not going to go anywhere, we can’t do anything with this” and sort of let people down, uhm, so that can be a challenge, especially if somebody disagrees. Just sort of making sure that we can communicate effectively why this happening, what things could be done, you know, because we don’t like to leave things with just “Hey, you’re out of luck.” It’s more like a “This, this patent says this, we can’t patent this but, if you’re interested in going this direction with your research, maybe you could look into this aspect and that would be something you would be interested in”, so sort of leaving things on a positive note. But so I guess communication can be a challenge occasionally. And then the biggest reward I would say is when, when they can get deals. Uhm, so licenses can, can take a long time, uhm, especially in the therapeutic space, so these licenses are often like biggest risk-biggest reward type things because when we’re licensing things to companies, they’re pretty early stage right? Uhm, in academia, your, our research is pretty basic science, even if it is something that is commercial, commercialization directed, uhm so it can be hard to find a licensee that wants to deal with this early stage thing, uhm which is why we do a lot more startups. Uhm, so once everyone is on board on what needs to get done and we can find the right resources to make something grow outside of the university and get that deal completed, that’s very rewarding, uhm, because in, in my field that only happens, you know, a handful of times a year. Uhm, so that I would say that’s probably the most rewarding thing.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

That’s cool.

Megan Griffin

Yeah.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

So as we learn more about your job, your career what would you say would make a candidate a top applicant for a position in an office like yours, especially if they didn’t go through the whole internship and fellowship route, right? They’re brand new in that field, but they are very interested, they just didn’t have those opportunities. So what would you tell them to basically, first of all, be confident in applying, but also what do you need to really emphasize in your application?

Megan Griffin

So I think, uhm, the, the biggest things are, uhm, communication is really important and if you have a PhD, the skill that you can sort of tout the most is just analytic thinking, so anyone in any field is going to learn these skills on how to take the scientific paper or, you know, other technical piece of literature, read it, but not spend a whole day on one paper because we don’t have time to do that. So read it, distill down the information fairly quickly to understand what are the key points, what makes this new and novel over something else, what do we need to focus on in terms of, you know, if we’re going to look at patents for this, what would be the key aspects that would make this novel over something else and who’s going to use it, how is it going to be effective. So I would say emphasize that and your ability to, to read technical information and make sense of it. Other skills are yeah, communicating effectively, self-organization is a big one, and then what can you do to make your application stand out if you haven’t had this internship and stuff like that, I, I would say as now as a postdoc is to sort of seek out, even if it’s not a formal internship, things that might get you some skills to advance things to commercialization so that I know there’s a lot of things at U of M. There’s miLEAD which offers consulting, a lot of consulting skills translate to what we do in our office, that would be a great thing. I know there’s Nucleate, that’s a good one. There’s a program called I-Corps, which you have to have a faculty mentor to do, but it’s sort of taking a project through the commercialization step and sort of understanding how would you commercialize something. So anything that has to do with entrepreneurship, uhm, intellectual property protection or commercialization advancement, even if it’s a, a one-hour seminar, I think if you could emphasize that you at least have some understanding and how these things work that would be really helpful and look good on a resume.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Cool. Thank you.

Maurinne Bonnet

So we are very fortunate also to have all of those resources at the University of Michigan, so postdoc should definitely look into those and pick some like you said.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Oh well thank you for all this information! I find it very interesting, like I never really was interested in this career, but it’s really cool. It seems to be very diverse and so you never get bored.

Megan Griffin

No, no, no, never get bored. That’s very true.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Yeah. So we’re not now getting to the final minutes of the conversation. And so we’re going to go through our rapid-fire questions. So the only rule is really to give the first answer that comes to mind. Are you ready?

Megan Griffin

Alright. Yeah, sure.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Cool. So what is a fun fact about yourself?

Megan Griffin

Fun fact about me, I have two children, ages two and four, and they are my biggest joy!

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Oh, that’s cool. Are you a coffee or a tea person?

Megan Griffin

Definitely coffee cannot function in the morning until I have a cup of coffee. (laughs)

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

What keeps you motivated when managing challenging projects?

Megan Griffin

It’s a great question. I would say just sort of looking at the end goal and keeping the end goal in mind and having that, that focus to get through all the hard stuff.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

What is your favorite music?

Megan Griffin

I like a big variety of music. I would say my favorite is sort of like the pop country genre.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Okay. And is there any career advice that you received in your whole career so far that you decided to ignore?

Megan Griffin

(laughs) That’s not where I saw that going!, Umh, what Idecided to ignore? I would say, I don’t know if this was true advice, but if someone’s like “Ohh you might, you don’t have enough experience for that, get some experience before you apply.” Just apply! I mean the worst that can happen is you’ll be told no, but you’re never going to get something you don’t apply for.

Maurinne Bonnet

Yeah. That’s so true. Yeah.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Very true. I love that.

Maurinne Bonnet

Yeah. And I guess you did well to apply because you’re here now!

Megan Griffin

Right? It worked out.

Maurinne Bonnet

So thank you again Megan for sharing your journey with us and getting, like walking us through the, the licensing and the Innovation Partnership Office with us. So for the audience, please do not hesitate to reach out to Megan if you have any follow up questions and follow our LinkedIn page for more episodes. And with that, I would say goodbye to everybody.

Anne-Sophie Bohrer

Bye.

Megan Griffin

Bye.