Members of the LSU AgCenter Patent and PVP Club who attended a reception in Baton Rouge on April 17 included, from left, Joan King, Department of Food Science; Philip Elzer, School of Animal Sciences; Gregg Henderson, Department of Entomology; Donal Day, Audubon Sugar Institute; Don LaBonte, School of Plant, Environmental and Soil Sciences; Steve Linscombe, Rice Research Station; Chandra Theegala, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering; Chris Clark, Department of Plant Pathology and Crop Physiology. (Photo by Linda Benedict. Click on photo for downloadable image.)

News Release Distributed 04/18/12

The LSU AgCenter recognized 17 new members of its Patent and PVP Club at a reception April 17 in Baton Rouge.

Members of the club have received patents or plant variety protection certificates – the equivalent of patents for new plant varieties – while working at the LSU AgCenter or with AgCenter collaborators.

They include AgCenter faculty members, research associates and graduate students and members of other institutions who participated in the development of the products, technologies or plant varieties that qualified for patents or certificates.

The reception also commemorated the 25th anniversary of the AgCenter Office of Intellectual Property, which manages the process of obtaining patents and licensing the products or technology for commercial development.

Much of the technology represented by these inventors has been licensed for commercial production, said Wade Baumgartner, director of the Office of Intellectual Property.

“Agricultural technology is unbelievable,” said LSU AgCenter Chancellor Bill Richardson. “The measure of success is that somebody is using something developed by a scientist who developed and patented an idea. And we have more good things in the pipeline.”

The patents and certificates typically represent the culmination of a decade or more of research, Baumgartner said.

The new members of the Patent and PVP Club are:

–Audubon Sugar Institute – Luis R.S.M. Bento, Chang-Ho Chung, Bruce Ellis

–Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness – Jesse M. Jaynes

–Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering – Steven Hall, Randy Price, Chandra Theegala

–Department of Entomology – Sanaa Ibrahim, Rosemary Patton, Betty Zhu

–Department of Food Science – Joan M. King, Yu Wang

–Department of Veterinary Science – Frank O. Bastian

–LSU School of Veterinary Medicine – Patricia A. Melrose

–Pennington Biomedical Research Center – Samuel M. McCann, Evdokia Menelaou, Wen H. Yu