The University of Tennessee Research Foundation has announced that Nghia Chiem, Ph.D., has joined the organization as a licensing associate.
“Dr. Nghia Chiem has an outstanding track record as a scientist and business development professional,” said David Washburn, vice president of UTRF. “His experience and knowledge of commercializing early-stage technology will further strengthen The University of Tennessee’s ability to catalyze economic development in the state of Tennessee.”
For the past five years, Chiem has served as a senior scientist for Protein Discovery, a Knoxville-based life sciences company with a focus on commercializing sample preparation technologies for the mass spectrometry market. In this role, Chiem was involved in many innovations of the company’s proprietary methods for processing protein samples. He also was involved in numerous in-licensing transactions with university intellectual property, and subsequently led the development team that productized the technology.
Prior to Protein Discovery, Chiem was a senior application scientist at Coventor. There he helped start a company, Cytonome, which was based on Coventor’s intellectual property.
At the University of Tennessee, Chiem will focus the majority of his efforts serving the Institute of Agriculture in Knoxville. He will work specifically with inventors from Animal Sciences, Food Science and Technology, Forestry, Wildlife and Fisheries, Biosystems Engineering and Soil Sciences, Veterinary Medicine, Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineering.
Chiem has a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Alberta (Canada), and is an inventor on four U.S. patents.