Brian Shedd has taken on the newly created position of executive director of the Office of Innovation and Commercialization at University of Texas Permian Basin.
Shedd began his duties Dec. 1, 2021.
He had been director of Technology Commercialization at the University of Houston for the past three years. Prior to that, Shedd worked in technology transfer roles at Louisiana State University and University of California, Los Angeles. He was a member of AUTM, the international professional organization for technology transfer for the past 13 years and currently volunteers as a trainer for the Essentials and Negotiations professional development committees, the UTPB website said.
“I also founded and run a private consulting company focused on the nexus between university technology transfer and small business,” Shedd said on the site.
A native of Baton Rouge, La., Shedd earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Colorado in Boulder, a bachelor’s in physical science from Southwestern University in Georgetown and a master’s and PhD from UCLA in mechanical engineering studying conducting polymer nanomaterials, the site said.
He and his wife, Stephanie, have two children, Jacob, 8, and Oliver, who is 3.
Shedd’s job is a mixture of things.
“The goal here, as I understand it, was to try and … unify all of the different innovation activities on campus. That includes things like technology transfer … which is basically managing university intellectual property through research and then commercializing it …,” Shedd said.
His office also will be coordinating with groups like the Small Business Development Center, Blackstone Launchpad, the Innovation Center, funded through the Odessa Development Corporation, Texas Water Institute and the Rhoden Center, among others, centralizing those activities so people can take advantage of them.
The CEED Building is just over 28,000 square feet and almost 14,000 square feet is under renovation, which will create more than 7,000 square feet for innovation activities, which includes the Office of Innovation and Commercialization spaces, the makerspace, working space and wet lab.
Midland Development Corporation is providing a primary grant of around $5 million, with part going to the renovations for the incubator and makerspace and another chunk for the operations of those facilities.
“We have other financial sources contributing as well, but I’m still getting those numbers finalized,” Shedd said in an email.
“… We’ll have specific functions, like technology transfer and managing some of the space that’s going to be built out here in the CEED Building. …We’ll have kind of co-working space, we’ll have leasable office space, we’ll have wet lab space, and we’ll have a makerspace. All of that will be open to the UTPB community, but also the external community,” Shedd said.
“We’ll have an opportunity to work with outside companies, start-ups and things like that. The last piece is really focused more on … industry collaboration. … just thinking about innovation … in … the broadest sense. … We’re talking about research and translating research into market activity and societal benefit. That’s all of it, so it’s kind of a broad net that we’re casting,” he added.
Shedd’s background is in technology transfer, which he said is “kind of a niche field.”
“It’s one of those things that I didn’t know about it until I started working in it, but every university has a technology transfer office of some kind. Bigger universities have a very big office. I started when I was at UCLA. We had an office of about 50 people that was managing all of the intellectual property for the university, licensing all of those intellectual property rights to start-ups, negotiating and managing all of the industry sponsored research contracts,” he said. “… UCLA does like a billion dollars research every year so it’s a really high-volume office. But I’ve worked in kind of smaller universities. I’ve worked in bigger universities, so tech transfer is kind of this like niche field.”
His office at UTPB, which is temporarily in the Engineering Building, has two people, himself and Program Coordinator CC Serrato. He said she has been at UTPB for a while and is helping him understand how everything works.
There were about nine in his office at University of Houston.
Shedd heard about the job at UTPB from a recruiting firm.
He was interested in the position because it would be creating something from the ground up.
“… There really wasn’t an Office of Innovation before this and knew a little bit about what the plans were around the building, redeveloping some of the CEED Building to be a space for innovation and commercialization activity. And that was really attractive. I understood there were a lot of local partners that were interested and invested in really trying to help the university get more organized around its innovation and collaboration activities. So Midland Development Corporation has put up a grant that is going to fund the office for a number of years. And they’re really interested in diversifying the economy, which I know is part of the mandate of the CEED Building. It’s in the title. They’re just trying to kind of look at broadening the industrial capability of the area, so I think that’s in a lot of people’s interests for this area,” Shedd said.
He added that not only is the CEED Building being renovated, but the Dunagan Library on the main campus as well.
“… They’re getting some innovation space. They’re going to have a similar kind of makerspace and they’re also getting some things are a little bit more student focused like an eSports arena and things like that. … We’re going to work really closely together. The way I look at it is they’re really focused more on the student population and getting them exposed to some of these ideas of innovation commercialization. And then at some point they might be able to jump over here to the CEED Building and … take their ideas and businesses to market,” Shedd added.
Midland Development Corporation has put up a roughly $5 million grant, with part going to the renovations for the incubator and makerspace and another chunk for the operations of those facilities, Shedd said in an email following the interview.
“We have other financial sources contributing as well, but I’m still getting those numbers finalized,” he added.
He said he thinks they will have a little bit of a broader customer base just having the need to engage with the external community.
“I think we’ll have entrepreneurs, inventors, makers and creators that aren’t really part of UTPB yet and we’ll be working with them as well here,” Shedd added.
This is a smaller university and a smaller town than Houston, so things will start small and see what kind of appetite there is for it.
“If we need to expand we can,” Shedd said.
The space being renovated at the CEED Building won’t be ready until the end of this year, or maybe early 2023.
“I don’t expect that we’ll get real active on the programming side until then, but leading up to that we’ll have a lot of opportunity to create partnerships, get relationships going with local industry and investment …,” Shedd said.
From there, they will try to figure out what programs to launch and how those will engage with different parts of the community that they want to draw to the space and get some buzz going.
“That’s kind of what we’re going to be doing in the short term,” Shedd said.
Part of his goal while he’s at UTPB is to get some energy going in the building that will help create new businesses, technologies and solutions to problems, not just for the market but for the community and society.
“… I want to encourage that kind of activity to take place here. That’s … one of the things that I’m about, I’m hoping to accomplish, as in supporting and working with some of the entrepreneurship activities is just to provide more engagement for the student body, to really get their eyes open to that field and just understand that if you’ve got an idea, there is a path to actually seeing it realized. That will be another part of the goal is to work with students. There will be an education component to that, so working with students on educating them to innovation and entrepreneurship activities,” Shedd said.
Dean of the College of Business Steve Beach said some really good candidates were interviewed and considered during the search process. But when the search committee interviewed Shedd, they had an almost immediate sense that he was the right person for the position.
“And when we came to that conclusion we just saw the full package of his experience at schools like UCLA, LSU and University of Houston, and furthermore, (with) his training, his background, and really his personality, he is going to really come in and be able to make an impact here in the Permian Basin,” Beach said.
He added that UTPB has so many “incredible projects” that they saw the need to hire someone to oversee all of them to make sure everything is coordinated across all the different programs that are in place.
“One of the primary skill sets and experiences Dr. Shedd brings in is his work in bringing ideas to be patented. That’s the commercialization part that is relevant for the university as our research … continues to be more impactful,” Beach said.
He said they can serve people who are just getting started with their entrepreneurial ideas to those that are more advanced.
The office also will help UTPB solidify its relations with industry and give students a chance for internships.
