Every year on April 26, we celebrate World Intellectual Property Day to learn about the role that intellectual property rights — patents, trademarks, industrial designs, and copyright — play in encouraging innovation and creativity.

This year’s World Intellectual Property Day campaign celebrates the brilliance, ingenuity, curiosity, and courage of the women who are driving change in our world and shaping our common future. Every day women come up with game-changing inventions and life-enhancing creations that transform lives and advance human understanding in fields such as astrophysics, nanotechnology, medicine, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

According to analysis from the  World Intellectual Property Organization ,  the number of women included in patent applications has almost doubled in the last 20 years. Despite this large increase in participation, however, women are included in less than a third of international patent applications.

Many societal issues contribute to this significant gender gap in use of the IP system . In most scientific, technical, engineering, and medical subjects, men continue to outnumber women by significant margins; consequently, fewer women work in the sort of fields that produce most technical innovations. 

At K-State, we are continuously finding ways to ensure that increasing numbers of women and girls engage in STEM subjects. The K-State Office for the Advancement of Women in Science and Engineering offers Girls Researching Our World and Exploring Science, Technology & Engineering — or GROW and EXCITE — as well as SUCCEED programs for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. Various other undergraduate research programs are open to all students but make special efforts to include women and underrepresented minority students. We are also working to encourage and support all researchers to participate in the intellectual property process.

For more information, contact the K-State Research Foundation at  [email protected] or 785-532-5720 or  visit a website that explains the commercialization process . 

— Chris Brandt, president and CEO, Kansas State University Research Foundation

The Office of the Vice President for Research and Knowledge Based Economic Development (KBED), in partnership with the Global Food Systems Initiative, will host a faculty event focused on human nutrition, health, and food consumption on Monday, May 21 from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. at the K-State Institute for Commercialization.

This event is designed to gather faculty who are working in human nutrition, health, and food consumption and those that support, affect, or are affected by food-related areas. Faculty engaged in food-related research, scholarly and creative activity will share existing work with an eye toward developing competitive and novel collaborations, grant proposals, and teams in advance of federal or corporate-sponsored opportunities. 

The highlight of the event will be the discussion, which will center on identifying:

If you are interested in attending, please contact Kiley Moody at  [email protected] or 785-532-3892. Look for additional information soon in K-State Today.

Scholarly Publishing's Last Stand

University publishing is nearly as old as printing: Within 23 years of Gutenberg finishing his Bible in Mainz in 1455, Oxford published a commentary on The Apostles’ Creed. Four decades later, Cambridge set up its own press. In North America, Harvard began printing a few years after its 1636 founding, beginning with religious texts, as they all did, but quickly moving on to publishing secular works. So the publishing of scholarship by university presses has long had something of the sacred about it.

U.S. Agencies Clash Over Who Should Regulate Genetically Engineered Livestock

A disease that kills millions of pigs a year may soon meet its match — if two federal agencies can agree on the idea. Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus is one of the latest examples of a condition that scientists believe they can beat with genetic engineering, and one that's caught up in a disagreement between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over how quickly such methods should be approved, and by whom.

How the Environment Has Changed Since the First Earth Day

When  Earth Day  was first created in 1970, it rode the coattails of a decade filled with social activism. Voting rights were strengthened, civil rights were outlined, and women were demanding equal treatment. But there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no  Clean Air Act , or  Clean Water Act .

Scientists' Early Grant Success Fuels Further Funding

The career-defining effect of winning a postdoctoral research grant has been laid bare in an analysis of thousands of young researchers’ professional trajectories. The work compared the fate of junior scientists in the Netherlands who just met the bar to qualify for post-PhD research funding with that of people who just missed out on the money. The successful group went on to secure more than twice as much research funding in the subsequent eight years, the analysis found.

Multimorbidity: A Priority for Global Health Research

Report from The Academy of Medical Sciences

Throughout the world, as life expectancy increases, the population incidence of non-communicable diseases is also increasing. Further, communicable diseases continue to affect millions of people every year. Together, all of these factors mean that multimorbidity has become, and will increasingly be, an international health challenge.

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