About Us > Governance > Elsie Quaite-Randall

Elsie Quaite-Randall, PhD

Executive Officer, Office of Research Contracts and Intellectual Property McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario

Dr. Quaite-Randall is charged with transferring the discoveries and knowledge created at McMaster University to the private sector. Her office oversees both the commercialization, licensing, and new company creation aspects of technology transfer, as well as collaborative research contracts with industry partners. She also heads the C4 network, a collaborative network of technology transfer offices in the Southwestern Ontario region. The network receives federal and provincial funding.

Prior to joining McMaster, Dr. Quaite-Randall was manager of intellectual property commercialization in the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT) at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., where she evaluated inventions made by researchers for their patentability and commercial potential. In addition to developing plans for promoting technology developed at the lab, she was responsible for identifying prospective partners both for research and development and commercialization opportunities in biotechnology.

Before joining OTT, Dr. Quaite-Randall worked in the legal department as an invention evaluator where she advised on the patentability of inventions reported at the lab and assisted with technical aspects of contract drafting. During this time, she completed her MBA and was admitted as a patent agent, allowing her to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Dr. Quaite-Randall was an active researcher in protein biochemistry, structural biology and molecular biology before joining academic administration. A native of Ireland, she came to North America after a post-doctoral fellowship in Berlin. She completed her undergraduate studies and received her PhD from the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland.