Suzanne Frisbie, Ph.D.,

Dr. Suzanne Frisbie is the director of the NCI Technology Transfer Center (TTC).  TTC supports technology transfer on behalf of NCI and nine other NIH Institutes. As TTC director, Dr. Frisbie is responsible for leading a team dedicated to meeting the TTC mission: “To enable and guide collaboration, invention development, and licensing to advance today’s discoveries into tomorrow’s medical care.” TTC guides its partners through the technology transfer (TT) process and provides expertise on patenting, facilitating collaborations, licensing and technology analysis and marketing.

Dr. Frisbie began the first part of her career at NCI in 1997 as a technology transfer (TT) fellow and ended her time at NCI in 2010 as a unit supervisor.  During that time, she became an NIH expert on human subjects in TT agreements, teaching the first NIH Technology Transfer University session on human subjects in 1998 and continuing this throughout her NIH career.  She was responsible for the creation and adoption of the “umbrella” Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) concept that is currently used across the agency.

From 2010 - 2019, she served as the first deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Office (TTIPO). Her accomplishments included fully defining the new role of deputy director, as well as setting up and managing a new fellowship program and new paralegal team.  In 2019, she returned to NCI as an associate director in TTC, a position she held for four years.  

Dr. Frisbie graduated magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke College with a B.A. in biochemistry and obtained her Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry from Georgetown University.  Prior to entering the TT field, she was a senior staff fellow in the intramural research program at NIAMS where she studied, via physiology experiments and X-ray diffraction, structure/function relationships in muscle. Her graduate work at Georgetown focused on the purification and biophysical characterization of human cobalamin binding proteins using laser photolysis, extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), and related techniques at Brookhaven National Laboratories.