27 Nov Call for Nominations: 2024 Bayh-Dole Coalition American Innovator Award
Washington, D.C. (November 27, 2023) — Today, the Bayh-Dole Coalition opened nominations for its 2024 Bayh-Dole Coalition American Innovator Award. Recent recipients include a 2023 Nobel Prize laureate, a battery technology expert, and other innovation trailblazers.
The American Innovator Award recognizes individuals who exemplify the determination and vision required to transform early-stage federally funded discoveries into real-world products that improve lives. Awardees will be profiled in the Bayh-Dole Coalition’s annual “Faces of American Innovation” report and honored during a congressional briefing and reception in Washington, D.C.
“Our inaugural awards ceremony and accompanying report were a resounding success, and the Coalition is excited to honor a new crop of pioneering American innovators,” said Joseph P. Allen, Executive Director of the Bayh-Dole Coalition. “While all of the awardees are certain to have unique backgrounds and areas of expertise, they will all share one crucial trait: perseverance through adversity. That’s the quality which drives our system, and these stories show that we should never take our success for granted.”
The award is open to university researchers, technology transfer professionals, venture capitalists, startup CEOs, and others who help bring promising inventions out of the lab and to consumers.
Winners in 2023 included Nobel Prize winner Katalin Karikó, the University of Pennsylvania biochemist who developed the platform for life-saving Covid-19 vaccines, and Dennis Liotta, the Emory University chemist who helped transform HIV from a death sentence into a manageable illness.
“The American Innovator Award brings much-needed awareness to the benefits of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which permitted universities and research institutions to manage the development of their own discoveries for the first time,” said Brian O’Shaughnessy, chair of the Bayh-Dole Coalition’s board of directors. “Without the Bayh-Dole Act, consumers would be deprived of countless world-changing inventions.”
To access the nomination form, please visit https://bayhdolecoalition.org/american-innovator-award-nomination/. Nominations will be accepted until February 5, 2024, at 10 a.m. EST.
About the Bayh-Dole Coalition: The Bayh-Dole Coalition is a diverse group of innovation-oriented organizations and individuals committed to celebrating and protecting the Bayh-Dole Act, as well as informing policymakers and the public of its many benefits.