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Linda Hosler: My name is Linda Hosler. I am the Innovator Recognition Branch Chief at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. One of the partners that we work with is the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is an organization that recognizes America’s greatest innovators, and one of the programs that they run is the Collegiate Inventors Competition. This is an invention competition for graduate and undergraduate students. And at the end of the competition, they get to come to the United States Patent and Trademark Office headquarters and meet with inductees, world’s greatest inventors, and patent examiners and other experts to really get a sense of how their invention might progress next.

They get to talk about patentability. What would it be like to launch a business? And from my position of seeing this competition over the years, it’s been really inspiring to see how the students take their idea from just an idea and use the competition as a launching pad to create their own businesses, get a patent, get funding, and so it really is a wonderful program.

Payam Pourtaheri: My name is Payam Purthahari. I’m co-founder and CEO of an ag biotech startup called Agrospheres. I was very fortunate at the University of Virginia to meet my co-founder, Amir Shaquille. We had discovered this technology. Amir was really big on this mini cell, what we now call the Agrocell technology as a really new, exciting way of delivering biomolecules. Applying our knowledge in agriculture was a really fun and exciting way of building a technology that led into a startup. He ran the best incubator at UVA.

Linda Hosler: Representation and participation from all Americans in invention, innovation and entrepreneurship are really critical for the future of our country as we compete globally through ingenuity and intellectual property and truly making the world a better place.

Payam Pourtaheri: When a lot of that began at that USPTO competition, the National Inventors Hall of Fame was just all-around awesome experience. Especially at the beginning, you have to believe in yourself even when you don’t want to. You kind of have to force yourself to believe in yourself and your team because it’s harder to get that early on.

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Elizabeth Dougherty: My name is Elizabeth Dougherty. I work for the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and I am the agency’s Northeast Regional Outreach Director. My team and I engage with stakeholders throughout the entirety of the East Coast of the United States, any place where there is someone who is eager and interested to learn more about the role and importance of intellectual property. My path to intellectual property, had a little bit of luck, had a little bit of good timing, and just a little bit of know-how. I came to the US Patent and Trademark Office right out of my undergraduate career with a degree in physics.

I was fortunate when I was finishing my physics degree that the US Patent and Trademark Office interviewed on campus, something the agency still does today. I knew that I wanted to put my physics degree to work, but how? When I saw that they were interviewing, it also rang a bell in my memory that my father has a US patent, which he’s still extremely proud of today. So I thought with a little bit of knowledge about what a US patent is, an opportunity to put my physics degree to work and a job offer. I started at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Jason Lott
Jason Lott, Managing Attorney for Trademark’s customer outreach at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A trademark is an indicator of source. It could be something like a brand name, a slogan, a logo, something like that. But the point of a trademark is to indicate the source of a particular product or service and distinguish it from the goods and services of somebody else. I didn’t really know anything about intellectual property, and I certainly didn’t know anything about trademarks. I was in a class that was about trademarks, and my professor was amazing. So it was really about the sort of mashup for business owners and other folks about trademarks and the internet, and I had no idea that that eventually would lead me to the career that I have now.

Elizabeth Dougherty:
So the US Patent and Trademark Office is striving every day to inform and educate individuals about the role of the agency, the work that we do for inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs, and also to empower individuals across all diversities to join in. I used to know someone who said that if we don’t empower diverse audiences, it’s like we’re competing against the rest of the world with four fingers in one hand tied behind our back.

Jason Lott:
I think the biggest advice that I would give to students is never be afraid to hold onto that thing that makes you unique, the thing that makes you special, that the things that you don’t know back then become such a part of your life that becomes your career.

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Rebekah Oakes: My name is Rebekah Oakes, and I’m a historian at the United States Patent and Trademark office.

At the USPTO, I’m an agency historian, which means my main responsibilities include research, writing, public speaking, and maintaining both a digital archive and a small physical archive. The origins of the USPTO actually go all the way back to the United States Constitution. So in the Constitution there’s a clause called the Intellectual Property Clause that charges Congress with promoting the advancement of creative works and inventions and allowing protection for the creators of those works. And that really kind set off the foundational aspects of what we now know as the USPTO. It goes all the way back to the Constitution, the founding of the country, and then the Patent office has kind of expanded in both scope and breadth in the 200 plus years since then.

Is there a particular patent holder or inventor that you find inspiring?

Lyda Newman was a woman living in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, and she invented a hairbrush with synthetic bristles that had an inner chamber that could be cleaned easily. So something that you could pop off the top of the brush, clean the inner chamber easily and pop it back on. She was a hairdresser in New York City. If you can kind of put yourself in the mindset of New York City in around 1900, there’s horses on the street, there’s a lot of dust, there’s a lot of kind of detritus in the air. Things got dirty. There’s smog from coal burning fireplaces. So this ability to clean a hairbrush very easily helped keep with sanitation, and it helped her be more competitive in a competitive market of hairdressers at the time. But what she’s most famous for is actually her work during the suffrage movement.

So fighting for women’s right to vote. Lyda Newman was put in charge of the effort to get African-American women involved in the suffrage movement in New York City. And she identified one barrier to access and figured out a way to solve that problem. She realized that mothers, especially working mothers, had to make a choice between child care and participating in the suffrage movement. So she established at Suffragist headquarters, a daycare, and this was kind of seen as revolutionary at the time, but other Suffragist headquarters across the country started adopting Newman’s idea. So it shows that she’s a person that’s not only thinking innovatively in terms of creating something new and receiving a patent, but also creating a new way of increasing civic participation within her community.

What time period of invention is most fascinating to you?

I would say one of the most fascinating periods in innovation, not necessarily because of the patents being produced, but because of the way that patents and inventions are being used, was the fight for civil and human rights in the late 19th and early 20th century. So we have one example within our agency history itself, a patent examiner named Henry Baker. And what made Henry Baker outstanding, aside from his 30 plus year career with the Patent Office, was that he took the time to research and compile the first list of African-American patent holders within US history. So much of what we know about African-American patent holders like Lyda Newman, who I mentioned earlier, is thanks to Henry Baker and his work.

There’s a lot of racist mythology going around at this time, and there was a belief, a racist, but unfortunately widespread belief that African-Americans were not contributing to national progress and could not invent something new. Baker’s list disproved this by showing just how many African-Americans had received patents, created something new and advanced technological progress in the United States. And his list was actually used by the Civil Rights Movement up until the 1960s as proof of this ingenuity and these contributions made by early African-American inventors.

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