Bryn Rees is the associate vice chancellor for research and innovation, and managing director of Venture Partners at CU Boulder — one of two tech transfer offices in the University of Colorado system. 

He’s been at the university since 2009 — apart from a few weeks in 2015 when he quit because he was done with transactional tech transfer. But then the opportunity came to fundamentally rebuild how commercialisation was done at CU, which is what he’s been doing since. 

Today, CU Boulder has everything you’d expect from a tech transfer office that produces more than 20 spinouts a year: from a startup-friendly licence to a dedicated investment affiliate, the Buff Venture Fund.

It’s been a long and fascinating road to arrive at this stage (though the university is famous for having created the pharmaceutical giant Amgen a few decades ago, and the faculty co-founder is still launching spinouts today) and Bryn is going to tell us all about that journey.

Talking Tech Transfer

Bryn Rees: CU Boulder

Beyond the Breakthrough is a weekly interview show with the brightest minds in university innovation tackling the question: how does research get from a lab into the marketplace?