Director of Commercialization, College of Engineering, OSU

Joe Tanous is the director of commercialization for the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, charged with creating successful companies stemming from innovative research.

Tanous has been a venture capital investor for over 15 years, having been a partner in three venture capital firms that invested over $100M in 50 startups. He has also been a startup executive at several companies including AutoDesk, MentorGraphics and OrCAD.

Tanous was involved with university research startups prior to joining Oregon State, helping to form companies such as Contour Design Systems (Mentor Graphics), Templex Technologies (Intel), Cascade Oncogenics and Travelon, with research from several universityies including Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, University of Washington, Stanford, UC Berkeley, as well as the Fred Hutchinson Research Center and other national research labs.