BY STEVE DANIEL

As Old Dominion's new intellectual property and compliance manager, one of Clovia Hamilton's goals is to see Old Dominion become a leader among its State Council of Higher Education peers when it comes to increasing licensing activity and generating royalty revenues. (See http://research.schev.edu/roie/four_year/ODU/listpeers.asp.)

She notes that one peer institution, for example, the University of Alabama, has $1.5 million in annual royalty revenue earnings, according to the latest report of the Association of University Technology Managers.

Suffice to say, Old Dominion is a long way from that amount, according to Hamilton. "A reasonable expectation, given the kind of technologies we have to offer, is to ramp up to $1 million over the next few years," she said. "This campus is a gold mine of very valuable creations. I want to mine the campus for invention disclosures and aggressively exploit what we have to offer."

To help the university attain this goal, Hamilton has been busy with a number of tasks since she arrived on campus July 2. She is building an infrastructure in the office, and has redesigned the intellectual property and research compliance Web pages, so that the necessary support is in place.

She's also conducting an inventory of the university's intellectual property to determine "what rights we have and what we have to offer to license." And she's in the process of creating a Web-based, online intellectual property catalog to showcase Old Dominion's technologies and copyrightable works.

"Old Dominion is an emerging research institution, and my challenge is to help the university make a fresh start, especially in the arena of licensing technologies," Hamilton said. "The goal with respect to intellectual property is to protect, market and transfer our technology into the marketplace and generate royalty revenues.

"I have met with a number of faculty on campus who are excited about their research, but they're anxious to have support from this office," she added.

One means of support is to evaluate researchers' disclosures in a more timely fashion, and Hamilton aims to reduce the turnaround period to 30 to 60 days.

Pursuing patents is an expensive process, she noted, and it's important to do the necessary homework that will determine whether or not to go forward with what may or may not be a better mousetrap. To help the office in the technology transfer arena, she plans to establish an internship program that will assist with market data collection, and she has agreed to teach a technology law course in the spring to encourage student involvement.

While helping boost the university's intellectual property activities, Hamilton sees the other half of her job description as equally important: research compliance. "It's something we can't afford to take lightly," she said. "We have to ensure that our researchers are complying with federal and state laws. We want to encourage ethically responsible research, and at the same time establish and maintain a culture of compliance with research-related laws and institutional policies and procedures."

Hamilton is currently in the process of auditing Old Dominion's research compliance files to ensure that the university is ready for any on-the-spot inspections. These audits relate to research involving human subjects, animals, biosafety, radiation, lasers and hazardous materials.

"We're placing as much information as possible on the Web to create a one-stop service center for faculty and student researchers," she explained.

Hamilton comes to Old Dominion from the University of Illinois' Office of Technology Management. Prior to that appointment, she worked as a technology transfer specialist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's National Fuel and Vehicle Emissions Lab.

A 1996 graduate of John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, she is registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a patent attorney and is a former patent examiner.

Hamilton, who earned her undergraduate degree in civil engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and is a certified city planner, also expects to receive a master of law degree from the school in October.