Rachel Dorin, Ph.D. ’13, co-founder and CEO of TeraPore Technologies, has been selected to receive the Bayh-Dole Coalition’s American Innovator Award. She and four other innovators featured in the coalition’s second annual Faces of American Innovation Report will receive the honor at a ceremony later this month in Washington, D.C. 

As a Ph.D. candidate, Dorin was working in the lab of Uli Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, when she co-invented a versatile method of producing tunable polymer membranes. After Dorin graduated, she founded TeraPore to develop her discovery into a platform for producing nanofilters that can remove impurities from medicines, making them safer for patients. 

Today, TeraPore's filtration products have already been used by the medical and pharmaceutical industries. The company is exploring additional applications in semiconductor manufacturing.

“Graduate students and postdocs play a crucial role in bringing technology to market as company founders,” said Alice Li, executive director of Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing (CTL). “Dr. Rachel Dorin exemplifies this by persevering through the challenges of commercializing an early stage invention and successfully bringing a new technology to market where it can have meaningful impact.”

In recent years, Cornell has established a wide array of business incubators, accelerators and programs to better help research innovators and entrepreneurs spin out startups based on Cornell technology like the one Dorin created. “Particularly, a program to help graduate students and postdocs on their entrepreneurial journey, Ignite Fellow for New Ventures, was launched,” said Lynda Inséqué, director of technology and venture initiatives and engagement at CTL. 

Recipients of the American Innovator Awards are selected by the Bayh-Dole Coalition, a diverse group of innovation-oriented organizations and individuals committed to celebrating and protecting the Bayh-Dole Act. Passed in 1980, the legislation allows universities to retain intellectual property rights to inventions from federally funded research. CTL is a coalition member.

“Because of the Bayh-Dole Act, Cornell was able to file patents and license out IP rights for Dr. Dorin’s discovery, which benefited from funding from the National Science Foundation,” Li said.

“I’m truly grateful for Bayh-Dole Act that facilitates technology commercialization, and for the unique ecosystem that it fosters in the United States,” Dorin said. “These have enabled TeraPore to translate innovation from Cornell and deliver precise nanofiltration solutions for mission-critical applications in health care and semiconductor manufacturing.”

“The Bayh-Dole Coalition is proud to honor Dr. Dorin,” said Joseph P. Allen, executive director of the Bayh-Dole Coalition. “Her success story exemplifies the positive impact of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows universities to translate groundbreaking federally funded research into real-world solutions that benefit the public here and around the world.”

CTL received 104 granted patents on behalf of Cornell with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and executed 113 license and option agreements in FY2023 alone. Between 2019 and 2023, Cornell launched 78 university technology empowered startups ­that together have raised $2.2 billion in funding.