Carol Mimura, Ph.D., RTTP is the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Intellectual Property & Industry Research Alliances (IPIRA) at the University of California, Berkeley. IPIRA is the portal to Berkeley for industry access to Berkeley’s preeminent faculty and research capabilities.
Carol has served as a member of the Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation of the National Academies of Sciences Institute of Medicine, on the boards of the Children’s Hospital Research Institute in Oakland, CA and BayBio, the regional voice of biotechnology in Northern California (as the Chancellor's alternate). She was a former Director and Executive Director of U.C. Berkeley’s Office of Technology Licensing, is a Registered Technology Transfer Professional, has received a Deal of Distinction award from the Licensing Executives Society, the President's Cup from Yale, an inaugural Patents for Humanity Award from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, several Distinguished Service Awards and a Chancellor's Special Service Award from UC Berkeley.
She established the office of IP and Industry Research Alliances (IPIRA) at UC Berkeley in 2004. UC Berkeley now has over 1,300 corporate sponsors of research and has increased industry expenditures by 8-fold since the office's inception. She was the lead negotiator for a $500M agreement with BP that established the Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley and stewarded a first-in-class melanoma drug from patenting, licensing, and ultimate monetization of the license royalty for $87.5M, with the possibility of additional milestone payments. The proceeds were used at UC Berkeley to enhance cancer research and stem cell facilities, undergraduate biology teaching laboratories, graduate student programs, faculty retentions and research infrastructure. She also established a Socially Responsible Licensing Program under which technological solutions from Berkeley are being deployed in low- and middle-income countries. Over 206 startup companies have been formed to commercialize UC Berkeley IP rights under license. 65 have raised an average of $13.8M in private funding and over a four year period a larger group raised >$1.6B. 29 companies have had a merger or acquisition, with cash and stock values over $8.3B. Over 600 products have been commercialized under license and dozens more are in the pipeline. For more information see: IPIRA brochure
Prior to her positions at U.C. Berkeley, Carol was an analyst at Technology Forecasters, a consultant to Cor Therapeutics and Genomyx, and wrote for the Genetic Engineering News.
She holds a B.S. degree from Yale University in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and Ph.D. in Biology (biochemistry and microbiology concentration) from Boston University. She was an NIH-sponsored postdoctoral fellow and research scientist at U.C. Berkeley in Biochemistry and in Chemical Biodynamics.
Carol’s public policy articles include:
and has scholarly publications on the sucrose phosphotransferase system in Streptococcus mutans and the histidine permease in Salmonella typhimurium in: