Dr. Whitney Hastings is an Intellectual Property and Partnerships Manager at the FDA and has nearly 10 years of technology transfer experience. She has a strong multidisciplinary background in both engineering and the health sciences, and manages a portfolio that includes medical devices, diagnostics, software, biologics, therapeutics, cosmetics, and food safety technologies. She works closely with the FDA scientists and Centers on collaborations, contracts and intellectual property strategies, and negotiates a variety of technology transfer agreements with the FDA’s industry and academia partners. She regularly provides tech transfer training to various internal stakeholders and represents the FDA technology transfer program in meetings with agency partners. She serves as the FDA’s representative on the HHS Exclusive Licensing Consultation Group (ELCG), is leading efforts on the FDA’s software IP management and the implementation of the FDA’s intake of monitoring and enforcement functions, and is assisting with the FDA’s TechTracS database development and data integrity procedures.
Prior to joining the FDA in 2015, Whitney was a Licensing and Patenting Manager at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Technology Transfer, where she successfully managed a large 200+ technology portfolio that included high-profile scientists, a wide range of technologies, and several complex high-value licensing deals. She also served as an Acting Branch Chief for one year during NIH’s reorganization, and held various leadership positions in technology transfer working groups. Whitney was instrumental in the development of key NIH agreements that minimized licensing barriers and execution time for industry partners, including the NIH Start-Up Agreements and several company-specific BML agreements. Additionally, Whitney routinely collaborated with external organizations, such as BioHealth Innovations, CAI and Johns Hopkins Cary School of Business, to advance the commercial development of her technologies and identify suitable partnerships. She has been a mentor to several technology transfer professionals and received many awards during her career as a result of her excellent performance in technology transfer.
Before working in technology transfer, Whitney worked in industry as an engineer with Corning, Inc. and was a fellow in the NCI Nanobiology program. She graduated with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and a minor in bioengineering from Clemson University, and completed her Master’s and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
