Director of Technology Licensing Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Ms. Nelsen earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from M.I.T. and an M.S. in Management from M.I.T. as a Sloan Fellow.
Lita Nelsen is the Director of the Technology Licensing Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has been since 1986. This office manages over 500 new inventions per year from M.I.T., the Whitehead Institute, and Lincoln Laboratory. Typically, they negotiate over 100 licenses, and start up over 20 new companies per year
Prior to joining the M.I.T. Technology Licensing Office, Ms. Nelsen spent 20 years in industry, primarily in the fields of membrane separations, medical devices, and biotechnology, at such companies as Amicon, Millipore, Arthur D. Little, Inc., and Applied Biotechnology.
Ms. Nelsen was the 1992 President of the Association of University Technology Managers and serves on the board of Mount Auburn Hospital, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Foundation. She serves as the intellectual property advisor to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and is a founding and current board member of the Center for Management of Intellectual Property in Health Research.
Ms. Nelsen is widely published in the field of technology transfer and university/industry collaborations and was a CMI Fellow at the University of Cambridge with the Cambridge MIT Institute studying university/industry/government partnerships in technology transfer and local economic development. She is a co-founder of Praxis, the UK University Technology Transfer Training Programme.
