Katharine Ku is Executive Director of the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) at Stanford University. OTL is responsible for the licensing of various state-of-the-art university technologies and industry sponsored research agreements, material transfer agreements and collaborations. In FY 2015, OTL received $95.1M in gross royalty revenue from over 695 technologies.
Ku was Vice President, Business Development at Protein Design Labs, Inc. from 1990-1991. Prior to Stanford and PDL, Ku was a researcher at Monsanto and Sigma Chemical, and taught chemistry.
Ku has served on the Certified Licensing Professional Board of Governors, BIO Board, and LES Board of Trustees. She was President of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) from 1988-90. She received the AUTM 2001 Bayh-Dole Award. Ku was a committee member of the NAS study entitled Management of University Intellectual Property: Lessons from a Generation of Experience, Research, and Dialogue. She is currently a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the Deputy Director of Intramural Research, the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Industry Advisory Board and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Science and Technology Partnerships Advisory Committee.
Ku has a B.S. Chemical Engineering (Cornell University), an M.S. in Chem. Eng. (Washington University in St. Louis).