Issue: 11/19/03

CAPE Award winner Jill Tarzian Sorensen

Turning inventions in realities

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11/19/03

Bill Burton

The annual CAPE (Chancellor’s Academic Professional Excellence) Award honors staff with a prize that includes a $1,000 salary increase, a $2,000 check and recognition for job performance above and beyond the call.

As a lawyer and a technophile Jill Tarzian Sorensen is ideally suited for her duties at UIC, which she describes quite simply:

“I work with researchers who have invented things and we look for ways to make use of them.”

Tarzian Sorensen has been helping protect and develop intellectual property at UIC since 1987, first as an attorney in the Office of University Counsel, and for the last five years as assistant vice chancellor for research and director of technology management.

“I love what I do. I’m the daughter of an inventor, so it’s a passion of mine to work with creative people, to take the work product that comes from their research and develop it for use outside the university,” she says.

Done right, technology transfer benefits both the researcher and the university, she says.

“It protects intellectual property — the fruits of their intellectual effort — and places it in the marketplace, so the research has a life beyond the journal publication.”

This generates revenue for the university and opportunities for further development.

“We prefer patents to trade secrets, since patents are about sharing knowledge,” she says.

Tarzian Sorensen graduated from Northwestern University and received her law degree from DePaul.

While she was in law school her father, a mechanical engineer, asked, “There are plenty of lawyers — how will you distinguish yourself?”

He proceeded to teach her drafting and how to read patent drawings. She later took graduate courses in chemistry here.

She joined UIC after a stint working on patent and trademark cases for a Loop law firm.

“UIC is very entrepreneurial and the faculty is wonderful, they’re not afraid to try new things,” she says.

She noted that the campus was instrumental in generating the proposal to form Illinois Ventures, a separate corporation to manage startups for the university.

Tarzian Sorensen and her family live in the western suburbs, where she is involved with her local school district. She also mentors seventh and eighth grade girls through a program at Oakton Community College.

“I’m a big fan of K-8 math and science education,” she says.

Anyone looking for a career in technology transfer needs to know intellectual property law, business practices and technical detail — an unusual skills mix, she emphasizes.

“But the most important ingredient is not learned, you bring it in with you.

“You have to be an optimist — and enjoy innovation.”