Inventors, entrepreneurs and small businesses across Florida and the southeast will have greater access to resources to protecting their ideas, inventions and brands through a new U.S. Patent and Trademark Office community engagement office at the University of South Florida.
The USPTO selected USF for its new office, which will expand access to intellectual property resources across the Florida High Tech Corridor and the broader Southeast Region.
As a leading Tier 1 research university, USF will host the new community engagement office in the USF Research Park on the Tampa campus. From this location, the office will serve the Corridor's 23 counties, helping a broad base of people and organizations better understand how to protect their inventions, ideas and brands and take the next steps toward bringing them to market.
USPTO community engagement offices are designed to make patent and trademark information more accessible, particularly for individual inventors, small businesses, veterans, students, and communities that may not otherwise have convenient access to the agency's services. In addition to patent filing assistance, the office will provide entrepreneurs and small businesses with information about federal trademark registration.
USF's research enterprise provides a strong foundation for the new office. USF has ranked in the top 20 U.S. public research universities for patent production for more than a decade. Key areas of innovation include cybersecurity, therapeutics, medical devices and artificial intelligence.
One example is Digitomy, a USF startup founded by researchers Ryan Carney and Sriram Chellappan. The company is developing the patented SmartTrap, a physical device that captures and photographs mosquitoes and uses artificial intelligence to identify species that may spread disease. By making mosquito identification faster and more accessible, the technology could help public health teams better monitor mosquito populations and respond to disease threats.
Digitomy's story illustrates how protecting intellectual property can help move promising research toward real-world impact. By bringing USPTO resources closer to the communities it serves, the new office will help more inventors and entrepreneurs, both within and beyond the university, understand how to protect their ideas and take the next steps toward bringing them to market.
The Tampa community engagement office is part of a broader USPTO effort to expand support for inventors and entrepreneurs across the southeast. The USF office joins offices recently established in Atlanta, Georgia; Huntsville, Alabama; and Raleigh, North Carolina.
