Megan Griffin holds a BS in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology from Michigan State University and obtained her PhD in Developmental and Molecular Biology from the University of Cincinnati. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan in 2020 and later was an U-M Innovation Partnerships fellow from 2020 to 2022. Megan is now the Assistant Director of Licensing at U-M Innovation Partnerships. In her role, she guides U-M innovators through the process of protecting their intellectual property and commercializing it through licensing to an interested company or creating a new startup venture. Connect with Megan on LinkedIn Resources U-M Innovation Partnerships miLEAD Consulting Group Nucleate NSF I-Corps program Transcript Anne-Sophie Bohrer Hello everyone and welcome to 'What's Up, Doc?', an initiative developed by the University of Michigan Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. 'What's Up, Doc?' is a professional development interview series created to support the career exploration efforts and professional development needs of current U-M postdocs. You will hear from former U-M postdocs discuss their own postdoc experience and share advice on their experience transitioning into their career of choice. We hope you will get the answers you want and need to make an informed decision about your own career. I am Anne-Sophie Bohrer Maurinne Bonnet And I am Maurinne Bonnet. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Today, our guest is Doctor Megan Griffin, who completed her postdoc at the University of Michigan in 2020. Megan is now working at the University of Michigan Innovation Partnerships as an Assistant Director of licensing. Welcome, Megan, and thank you for joining us. Megan Griffin Thank you for having me. Maurinne Bonnet Hey, Megan, it's a pleasure to have you today. So as Anne-Sophie said, you are currently working at Innovation Partnerships, so for some, some of us who are not familiar with that, could you briefly tell us more about this office, what are its main missions, what what are you doing there? Megan Griffin Sure. Yeah. So Innovation Partnerships was recently rebranded, used to be the Office of Technology Transfer here at the University of Michigan. And we rebranded really to capture a wider array of things that we do. So we're sort of divided into 3 branches. I work with the licensing team, we have a ventures team and we have our corporate and foundation research alliances team. So collectively, all of these groups work closely together, and our overall mission is really to help faculty or students or staff, whoever at the university that has innovative research, get that research out to the public. So really our our core mission statement is that we want every piece of research at the University of Michigan have the opportunity to impact the world. So we do this by helping to protect intellectual property that can be in the form of patents or copyrights or, you know, sometimes we can license things without protection, and then we also will try to get it to the world, either through licensing that to companies, help people create their own startup companies, uhm connect people with funding resources, that's another thing we do. So we have a couple of internal translation funds that we manage that are meant to fund the gaps in research to get it to a point where it's ready to be commercialized. And we also have investment funds for creating startup ventures. Uhm, so it's kind of, you know, overall the overarching goal of our office. And if you want to know more about the specific branches, I can get into more detail. Anne-Sophie Bohrer Cool. Well, that's really interesting. Uhm, so clearly you're still somehow and somewhat involved with the science, uhm, but you're not at the bench anymore, you're not in the lab anymore. And so can you tell us a little bit about your background and really what led you to choose to pursue this career? Megan Griffin Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in life sciences, I got a PhD at the University of Cincinnati in molecular and developmental biology. As I was wrapping up my graduate career, I was starting to think about what I wanted to do overall and I hadn't really quite settled on a career path. That was the first time I heard of tech transfer and I thought" Huh, that sounds kind of interesting, let me find out more." So I met with the tech transfer office at the Children's Hospital where I was doing my research, and sort of found out more about the career, but at that point I was about to graduate, it was a little late to get involved with them, uhm, and they told me that, you know, some schools have these internship opportunities available that you might be able to do if you choose to do a postdoc or something like that or maybe you can directly apply. So I decided to do a postdoc to keep my options open, so to speak. I hadn't totally ruled out the traditional route of, uhm, you know, trying to get a professor position, uhm, but I was sort of leaning against it, so I decided to take a postdoc opportunity here with University of Michigan. And I knew going in that the university had this internship opportunity for graduate students and postdocs with what was then the Office of tech transfer. Uhm, so I started my postdoc and sort of that knowledge in the back of my mind and kept my eyes and ears open for any postings or any knowledge about this internship opportunity. So about a year into my postdoc, I got an e-mail, uhm, I forget who it came from, probably the, you know, postdoc affairs, about different opportunities and saw that they were hiring interns, so I applied and was fortunate enough to get that position. Uhm, so I did that for the rest of the duration of my postdoc, uhm, concurrent with that position. So this was like a 10 hour a week remote position, uhm, and got me some exposure to this career path. I really enjoyed doing it, decided that I wouldn't be sad if I never looked at a pipette again, uhm, as much as I love bench research, I was kind of ready to step away. But I didn't want to lose, like you mentioned, this is related to science, I, I didn't want to lose that, you know, learning about cutting edge research and I really liked everything that academia had to offer, uhm, so this seemed like a good fit for me, where I get to learn about all the exciting research, use my training to sort of decipher what that knowledge means, uhm, but then sort of meet the business arm, uhm, and try to translate that research into a commercial product or, you know, in, in my sweet spot of my background in life sciences, uhm, I spent a lot in the area of therapeutics, so drug development, how can we treat patients better with a variety of diseases. Maurinne Bonnet So we'll come back later with Anne-Sophie about like your day-to-day life, and I think what, what I'm really curious about is so when you decided to join the U of M, is it because you knew there would be this fellowship or you actually decide to join the university to join a specific lab? Megan Griffin Yeah, so it was a combination of things. Uhm, knowing that the fellowship existed definitely helped my decision, uhm, but I, I was mostly focused on finding a postdoc that fit my career interests, as well as, you know, fit my personal life. So I didn't, I applied for multiple postdocs, uhm, and some of my other interviews, I asked about tech transfer and if there were any opportunities there to, you know, volunteer, shadow, get involved with the office, just to explore the career. And, you know, there's a variety of levels of things that other universities, but I, I grew, I was born and raised, well I wasn't born here, but I was raised in Michigan and I have family nearby, so that helped in my decision to come back to Michigan for a postdoc. And the lab that I joined, uhm, was Jordan Schaefer's lab with Michigan Medicine and studied thrombosis. My graduate work was in blood vessel development, so it was sort of an adjacent area. Uhm, I did my graduate work with zebrafish as a model organism and joined the zebrafish lab here, uhm, so it was a good fit in a lot of ways: fit my area of interest for research, fit my geographically preferred location and I knew that this fellowship existed. Maurinne Bonnet That makes a lot of sense, yeah. Sounds like it was a good decision. Megan Griffin Yeah! Maurinne Bonnet So, uhm, you, you said that you got this part-time fellowship that takes you up to, like, 10 hours per week. So, uhm, how did you kind of manage the logistics between your bench work, you know, fulfilling your duty as a postdoc, and also working at the Innovation Partnership office? And did your PI support you in that? Megan Griffin Yeah. So, uhm, my PI was very supportive in order to have additional work because it is a paid internship, you have to have approval, I think as a graduate student and perhaps with a postdoc. So they just ask that your PI sign this letter of support, that they know you're doing this, and they're, they're okay with it. Uhm, and fortunately, my PI was very supportive, I, you know, came to him and said "There's this opportunity, I'm interested in this as a career. This will only take up to 10 hours a week. I understand that I need to get my research done in the lab as well. And you know, I won't, I'll make sure it doesn't interfere." and he was very on board with "Oh yeah, you should follow your career interests. The career development is very important. If you're interested in this happy to support you, uhm, trying it." So that was sort of step one. And then in terms of balancing the workload, the part time fellows help with sort of invention intake analysis, so when an invention comes to our office, we get this sort of one-pager form that summarizes what the invention is, and we have a handful of fellows with a variety of backgrounds. So, uhm, somebody in my role, a licensing manager, will request a fellows report and once that report is requ
