Accelerating Technology Transfer for Socio-Economic Impact
CERN, Geneve, Switzerland & GSI Helmholtz Centre, Germany
While I was an EU Marie Curie Fellow, I worked with the HEPTech Network at CERN in Switzerland, and with GSI in Germany, to find ways to accelerate their technology transfer.
My collaborators and I started from a practitioner perspective, but also tried to find inspiration in academic literature across various disciplines, from computer science to the philosophy of science and technology. As a result we mapped the scientific and technological information flows as well as the social and economic impact of high energy physics technology (e.g. see this study on particle therapy of cancer). The above organizations as well as other institutions in their networks provided access to their star scientists, technology transfer leaders, business leaders, as well as funding.
By using data-driven and mixed-method approaches, I identified scientific & technological trajectories, and suggested ways to accelerate the transfer and emergence of new technologies that can positively impact society. I presented such research at CERN, Stanford, the European Commission, and a number of European universities.
The project inspired CERN to create Collaboration Spotting, a new platform that allows researchers to navigate the Web of Science and global patent data to accelerate interdisciplinary research collaborations and technology transfer from scientific and corporate labs to society in a wide variety of fields including IT, health and sustainability. The platform combines knowledge graphs, natural language processing, and other advances in network and information science. I served as an advisor to the team that built Collaboration Spotting, which CERN included among its success stories.
