MIT’s sponsored research exceeds $750M annually, with funding received from federal agencies, private foundations, and industry. MIT also has a global reputation for its startup, innovation, and entrepreneurial culture with 30+ startups launched annually in collaboration with the MIT Technology Licensing Office (TLO).

This seminar is designed to build your financial conflict of interest (fCOI) knowledge base by presenting the history and evolution of the financial conflict of interest in research regulations, providing an overview of the COI process at MIT, and outlining the benefits of the collaborative efforts of the COI office and the MIT TLO to enable the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT.

Rupinder Grewal, MIT COI Officer, and Lauren Foster, Associate Director of Life Sciences at the Technology Licensing Office, will provide historical context and insight into topics, including the discussion of these and other questions:

- Given the financial drivers of the for-profit world, how does MIT ensure that objectivity is maintained in its fundamental research activities?

- How does MIT protect research results from influence when an Investigator has outside financial interests?

- What kinds of fCOI situations arise in our environment and how do we manage them?

- How do researchers navigate potential COI issues in startup activities?

About the speakers:

Rupinder Grewal has served as MIT’s (first) COI officer for over 8 years, since 2012. Before assuming her current role, she spent 5 years in MIT's Technology Licensing Office working on MTAs, tangible property licensing, and multi-party research collaboration agreements. Prior to joining MIT, she spent over 10 years in research management roles in both academia and industry with a focus on research process development and improvement and implementation of high-throughput genomic platforms.

Lauren C. Foster is the Associate Director of MIT's Technology Licensing Office (TLO), focusing principally on licensing and commercialization of technologies in the biomedical, biotechnology and medical device fields. Prior to joining MIT, Lauren was Senior Director, IP and Technology Acquisition at Antigenics, Inc., a public biotechnology company, where she played an integral role in envisioning and implementing the company’s business, intellectual property and technology strategies. Lauren was also a Technical Specialist at the law firm Lahive & Cockfield LLP where she focused on strategic development of intellectual property rights for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and universities.