WSU appointed Jeremy Tamsen as the new Office of Commercialization director on Dec. 1.
Tamsen will work to help the Office of Commercialization connect discoveries and developments at WSU to their respective industries.
He started working at WSU in 2022 as innovation and commercialization director at the College of Agriculture, Human and Natural Resource Sciences. During that time, he worked with the Board of Regents, the Attorney General’s Office and WSU Risk Management. He also helped with the WA 64 apple, also known as Sunflare.
Before joining the WSU staff in 2022, Tamsen was no stranger to the Palouse. He worked at the University of Idaho as the Office of Technology Transfer director. While working at UI, royalty revenues rose from $568,629 in 2016 to $3.35 million in 2021. Tamsen also obtained his juris doctor degree from UI.
Tamsen said WSU spent around $335 million in research expenditures last year.
CAHNRS has been producing the most revenue through licensing from WSU. His new role will be similar to what he was doing at CAHNRS but will be expanded throughout the entirety of WSU. Tamsen will still advise leadership at CAHNRS and is the lead project manager for CAHNRS Intellectual Property.
According to the CAHNRS innovation website, their intellectual property brought in $8.7 million in royalties in 2023. The top royalty producers from CAHNRS are Cougar Gold Cheese, the Cosmic Crisp apple, licensed wheat varieties and microwave sterilization and pasteurization technology.
Tamsen said if students want to be a part of the research that goes into making the products that come out of WSU, they should find faculty members in their college who are doing research.
“We are the number-one recipient of USDA competitive grants,” Tamsen said. “That means that people who are writing grants for the University of Florida, the University of California, from all the places we are getting funded before they are.”
Tamsen’s goal at the Office of Commercialization is to provide service to all the colleges and faculty members. Since the commercialization part of the research can be difficult, Tamsen provides his abilities to reassure researchers they have help guiding their research through the commercialization system.
“Some of the most interesting stuff that I just started dealing with in the last month or so is stuff I cannot talk about,” he said.
