College of Charleston students gain access to NASA patents

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The College of Charleston has signed an agreement with NASA to become a partner in the space agency’s technology transfer program, the school said in a news release.

This gives College of Charleston students access to NASA’s nearly 1,600 technological patents under the NASA Technology Transfer University, the college said.

The T2U program is designed to give students at higher education institutions with NASA-developed technology the chance to work with federal government research and technology. The college said this will allow student entrepreneurs to build case studies with NASA’s patents and explore issues surrounding commercialization of technogy, including licensing of intellectual property.

Entreprenurial studies professor Kelly Shaver said the idea is give give students experience that could help them professionally after graduation. Shaver is teaching a technology commercialization course at the College of Charleston, which is part of the T2U program.

Shaver taught a biomedical commercialization course with a neuroscientist from the Medical University of South Carolina, the college said. This course brought together business students from the College of Charleston together with doctoral and post-doctoral research students from MUSC.

The students in that course produced feasibility studies for commercial applications for research being done at MUSC. Shaver saw a similar opportunity when CofC joined the NASA program last year, he said.

“Like the biomedical commercialization course, this T2U course gives students the opportunity to work on a project thoroughly grounded on existing and patented technologies,” Shaver said in a statement.

Thirty-seven colleges and universities across the country are working under the T2U program, and CofC is the only one in South Carolina.