Over half of patents issued to BYU inventors list student co-inventors
Brigham Young University was just ranked as one of the top 100 universities in the nation for most issued patents. But the new ranking from the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) isn’t the story for BYU; it’s who holds the patents.
Of BYU’s 18 newly-issued patents included in the ranking data, 10 of them list students as inventors or coinventors. Which is, according to BYU Technology Transfer director Dave Brown “very unusual… in a good way.”
“When more than half of our U.S. patents list a student alongside a professor, that’s campus, with our student-mentoring focus, turning into a launchpad for invention,” Brown said. “BYU is building inventors who can serve the world by solving real-life challenges.”
Published research shows that nationally only a small percent of graduate students ever appear on a patent — roughly 4% of STEM doctorate students, even at R1 universities with strong commercialization cultures. Because those patents are then mixed with a large volume of faculty-only filings, the share that includes any student inventor typically falls in the 10-20% range, according to AUTM licensing survey data and peer-reviewed studies.
BYU’s share of patents with student inventors sits at 56%.
“BYU is in a very select group — fewer than a dozen U.S. institutions — where student inventors appear on a majority of issued patents,” Brown said. “Making the NAI Top 100 ranking shows that BYU is succeeding at training the next generation.”
BYU students hold new patents for impressive-sounding tech inventions, including:
- artificial vertebral endplates
- electromagnetic trap multiplexing
- integrated cleaning device for optical instruments
- multi-stage stent devices
Of the BYU student coinventors highlighted in the 2024 report, a handful of them are listed on multiple patents. Jacob Sheffield and Lance Hyatt are both named on four patents while Kendall Seymour and Scott Cunnington are both listed on three.
"The culture of innovation and inventorship at BYU starts from the top down," said Sheffield, who exclusively licensed one of the patents he worked on as a student and built a startup, Bloom Surgical, around it. "As an undergraduate, I was granted a level of research autonomy typically reserved for graduate students, and as a master's student, I had the freedom to explore like a Ph.D. candidate.
Released annually, the NAI Top 100 U.S. Universities ranking highlights and celebrates U.S. academic institutions that play a large role in advancing innovation through the critical step of securing their intellectual property through patents. The NAI has published the Top 100 Worldwide Universities List since 2013 and added the Top 100 U.S. Universities List in 2023.
The University of California system tops the 2024 list, with MIT, the University of Texas system, Purdue and Stanford rounding out the top five. BYU, the University of Utah and Utah State University all made the rankings, a significant feat for a state with a smaller comparative population.
