Licensing Team

Eric Payne

Senior Licensing Executive and Licensing Team Lead

Eric joined TTO in 2009 and is responsible for the commercialization of bioenergy innovations and lead's NREL's licensing team. He was previously a technology manager at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he focused on licensing biopharmaceutical, engineering, and energy technologies. He has commercialized many early-stage technologies and has licensed technology to numerous startup companies. Eric holds degrees in genetics and microbiology from Purdue University and a Master of Business Administration. He is a certified licensing professional and is registered to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

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Erin Beaumont

Senior Licensing Executive

Erin Beaumont joined NREL in 2015 as a licensing executive. In this role, she works to manage and license NREL's intellectual property portfolios in buildings, energy storage including batteries, grid integration and power systems, cybersecurity, concentrating solar power, wind and water energy, and geothermal. Before joining NREL, Beaumont was an innovation manager at the University of New Mexico, where she managed and commercialized a portfolio of early-stage, engineering, and physical science-related inventions, including licensing and startup formation. Beaumont holds a Master of Public Administration and a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from the University of New Mexico.

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Jennifer Fetzer

Licensing Compliance Administrator

Jennifer Fetzer joined NREL in 2017. As licensing compliance administrator for TTO, she tracks obligations related to license agreements and processing royalty payments. Before joining NREL, Fetzer worked in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems Technologies at Sandia National Laboratories. She has a Master of Science in biomedical engineering from the University of New Mexico and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Colorado Denver.

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Bill Hadley

Senior Licensing Executive

Bill joined TTO as a licensing executive in 2014, overseeing the NREL solar photovoltaic and materials science intellectual property portfolios. He has received special distinction by both NREL and the Federal Laboratory Consortium for his management of NREL’s portfolio of patents surrounding Dynamic Hydride Vapor Phase Epitaxy and is a member of the Department of Energy’s Technology Transfer Working Group subcommittee on Industry Engagement. Before joining NREL, he worked in private practice and in technology transfer at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, where he evaluated technologies in a variety of biotech areas. He earned his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Colorado School of Mines and his Juris Doctor from Creighton University.

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Jean Schulte

Licensing Executive

Jean Schulte joined NREL in August 2015. As a licensing executive for TTO, she manages the portfolio of software technologies across all of NREL’s research areas, working with researchers to identify and implement optimal deployment strategies for software, often via open-source or commercial licensing. Before joining NREL, she worked as a patent and market analyst at Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the TTO for the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Schulte holds a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering from The Ohio State University.

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