I think I’ve finally caught up from being away in California. Here are few interesting things I came across when trolling through the backlog in my RSS reader today.

Frank Douglas resigned from his position as head of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation a couple of months ago. An African-American, Douglas said he quit because he “perceived an unconscious discrimination against minorities and because my colleagues and the institute authorities did not act on my recommendations to address these issues.” His article in The Scientist gives his take on the James Sherley controversy and criticizes MIT for not having the will to tackle the problems of faculty racial diversity (lack thereof).

He talks about how selecting people for career advancement can be affected not just by their intellectual/professional accomplishments but also by perceptions of “social acceptance” and “best fit”…which is where discrimination can come into play.

Incidentally, Harvard recently came out with its yearly status report on faculty diversity and the numbers don’t look good. According to the Harvard Crimson, “The proportion of female ladder faculty members did not rise by more than 3 percent in any faculty over the two-year period measured in the report, and overall minority representation for ladder faculty increased by less than 2 percent during the period.”

In other news, MIT’s Technology Review magazine has a profile of Dave Berry, Cambridge-based venture capitalist who got his PhD from MIT, working in the lab of Robert Langer, MIT’s renowned chemical engineer and inventor. Berry has come up with a way to engineer microbes so that they produce hydrocarbon-based chemicals that could have industrial applications, like fuel. It’s the basis for a startup company called LS9. The magazine has named him innovator of the year.

And finally, Jim Collins, a biomedical engineering professor at BU, has written a short piece on how to improve technology transfer, given BU’s new drive to beef up its tech transfer efforts. He recommends that technology entrepreneurs be more involved in the workings of the university, such as serving as adjunct professors, and that university licensing offices should combine IP and technology from multiple labs when spinning out companies.