Innovation from Bench to Bedside: Research to Commercialization

I am a Registered Technology Transfer Professional and have been managing commercialization activities in universities since 1996.

Before these university appointments, I served in research, business development, and company leadership roles in startup businesses, with an emphasis on fundraising and corporate partnership development. My experience in academia and the private sector includes basic research, business development, company formation, licensing and management of university intellectual property, technology-based economic development, and related issues.

Since 2014, I have served as a Specialist Reviewer for the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program and previously as a reviewer for the Research Competitiveness Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

During my university technology transfer career, I have focused on technology transfer related public policy issues: I served on the Executive Committee of the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Governmental Relations (COGR) and made an invited presentation on patent reform matters to the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

At Wake Forest Innovations my goal is to enhance our capacity to add value and impact to the outputs of research and innovations created by Wake Forest and Enterprise teammates by moving basic research discoveries to partners who will transform these inventions into beneficial products and services, thereby improving quality of life.

I am Co-Director of the Center for Redox Biology and Medicine as well as Co-Director of the T32 Training Program in Redox Biology and Medicine, joining the other Wake Forest T32 Training Program in Structural and Computational Biophysics that I helped build previously. I serve on the Editorial Board of the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine (FRBM), and in 2017 I was appointed as a Fellow of the Society for Redox Biology and Medicine (SfRBM). In 2005 I received the (inaugural) Mid-Career Basic Science Research Investigator Award from Wake Forest School of Medicine. I helped establish and served as vice chair and chair (2010 and 2012) of the Gordon Research Conference on Thiol-Based Redox Regulation and Signaling. I have published >150 mostly primary research papers, at least 28 of which have been cited more than 100 times.

I am a Professor in the Department of Cancer Biology at WFUSM with secondary appointments in the Departments of Physiology and Pharmacology, Molecular Medicine, and a joint appointment with the Wake Forest/Virginia Tech Biomedical Graduate Sciences Graduate Program. My research focuses on cancer biology and fluoropyrimidine biochemistry and emphasizes translational science, particularly for colorectal cancer and gastrointestinal malignancies. I have or have been the PI on multiple R01 awards as well as U01, R21, R29, R41 and R42 awards from NIH-NCI and grants from the DoD, the NC Biotechnology Center, and other agencies. I have authored and co-authored >110 peer-review publications related to my research with >10 issued patents and several pending patent applications. My work intersects with others involved in drug discovery / development and translation to clinical trials. I am passionate about mentoring and educational activities and am the course director for 2 graduate courses in the Cancer Biology curriculum, advisor for 7 PhD students and 4 MS students and served on the dissertation and thesis committees for 14 graduate students and trained 10 post-doctoral researchers.

Adam Hall received his training in physics and materials sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a NASA Graduate Student Research Program (GSRP) Fellow and received the Ross & Charlotte Johnson Family Dissertation Fellowship. He then completed postdoctoral research at the Technische Universitat Delft in the Netherlands. From 2010-13, he was an Assistant Professor of Nanoscience at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering in Greensboro, NC, where he earned awards for both his research activities and teaching. He joined the faculty of the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences in August of 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the Wake Forest University School of Medicine and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2021. Adam has published more than 50 journal articles and is an inventor on 5 patents. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (including NCI, NIGMS, NIBIB, and NHGRI), DoD, BARDA, 3M, and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.