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Brian is currently the Executive Director of the George Washington University (GW), Technology Commercialization Office (TCO). He is also an active angel investor in early stage medical companies.

Brian's GW TCO team strives to bring new inventions developed at GW to the market through partnering with companies. Brian established two complimentary funding mechanisms to de-risk GW technologies, the Technology Maturation Awards (TMAs) for unlicensed technologies, and the SBIR Matching Fund for technologies licensed to startup companies.

His broad scientific background contributes to developing relationships between GW faculty and industry licensees. As a registered U.S. Patent Agent, Brian can take advantage of his understanding of patent prosecution in evaluating novel technologies. He spent the first 9 years of his career at GW managing the life science portfolio of inventions that included therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical devices.

Brian has negotiated multiple license agreements with startups and small businesses and continues to maintain productive partnerships with those developing technologies from GW. Most notably, Brian licensed angiotensin II for septic shock to La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company (NASDAQ:LJPC), which is now marketed in the U.S. as GIAPREZA. A rare story of expedient development, angiotensin II went from a pilot study at the GW Hospital directly to a phase III trial after licensing to LJPC. Most recently, Brian managed the monetization of a portion of GW's royalty stream from GIAPREZA. Brian utilized some of the monetization proceeds to establish the TMAs and SBIR Matching Fund.

Brian has been invited to speak on technology commercialization at various events including those hosted by AUTM and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Since 2021, Brian has made angel investments as a member of Life Science Angels, a premiere group focused on improving healthcare worldwide by helping entrepreneurs with disruptive advances in healthcare discovery and delivery.
 

Brian started his career in technology transfer as a Marketing Intern at the National Institutes of Health, Office of Technology Transfer. At the NIH, he produced abstracts for new technologies. He also applied targeted marketing outreach to introduce inventions to potential licensees. He developed additional professional technology transfer skills through graduate coursework at the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences.

Brian has had a wide range of experiences in biological research. In his first job at Genome Systems, Inc. (now a subsidiary of Incyte Corp.) he split time between conducting inventory of millions of frozen DNA clones and servicing DNA clone orders and sequencing requests. At the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University (now the McDonnell Genome Institute), he worked with Prefinish Lab team members to fill gaps in draft genome sequences. Much of this sequencing work contributed to the Human Genome Project. As a technician in Stephen Johnson's lab at Washington University, Brian performed genetic mapping to locate zebrafish mutations that caused fin development defects.

Working on mouse limb development in Liang Ma's lab, Brian completed his Honors Thesis for his B.S. degree from Tulane University. He then continued his studies, earning his Ph.D. with cell biology studies in Min Li's lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Brian followed up his graduate work by studying the sensation of touch during a postdoctoral fellowship in Martin Chalfie's lab at Columbia University.