Fred Farina: California Institute of Technology

Fred Farina is the chief innovation and corporate partnerships officer at California Institute of Technology (or Caltech) where his duties also include overseeing the technology transfer out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He tells us what it was like to start his career in tech transfer by being hired by AUTM founder Larry Gilbert and what has kept him around Caltech for more than two decades.

Caltech came to technology transfer much later than its peers – in 1995 – and Fred tells us why that is and how it has caught up to its peers, how his office is treading carefully to provide additive services without shifting the culture away from foundational research and how Amazon Web Services came to be the first corporate to build its own building on campus.

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“Funk Game Loop” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) • Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0