MIT alumna Vanessa Chan's Wulff Lecture explored materials innovation, commercialization, and career development, highlighting adoption readiness levels used by the U.S. Department of Energy and the path from research to real-world impact.
To Vanessa Chan PhD '00, effective engineers don't just solve technical problems. To make an impact with a new product or technology, they need to bring it to market, deploy it, and make it mainstream. Yet this is precisely what they aren't trained to do. In fact, 97 percent of patents fail to make it over the "commercialization wall." "Only 3 percent of patents succeed, and one of the biggest challenges is we are not training our PhDs, our undergrads, our faculty, to commercialize technologies," said Chan, vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. She delivered the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE)'s spring 2025 Wulff Lecture at MIT on March 10. "Instead, we're focused on the really hard technical issues that we have to overcome, versus everything that needs to be addressed for something to make it to market." Chan spoke from deep experience, having led McKinsey & Co.'s innovation practice, helping Fortune 100 companies commercialize technologies. She also invented the tangle-free headphones Loopit at re.design, the firm she founded, and served as the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)'s chief commercialization officer and director of the Office of Technology Transitions during the Biden administration. From invention to impact A DMSE alumna, Chan addressed a near-capacity crowd about the importance of materials innovation. She highlighted how new materials — or existing materials used in new ways — could solve key challenges, from energy sustainability to health care delivery. For example, carbon fiber composites have replaced aluminum in the airline industry, leading to reduced fuel consumption, lower emissions, and enhanced safety. Modern lithium-ion and solid-state batteries use optimized electrode materials for higher efficiency and faster charging. And biodegradable polymer stents, which dissolve over time, have replaced traditional metallic stents that…