Karl Ruping is an Associate at Harvard’s Asia Center, focusing on technology development, academic innovations and intellectual propriety rights in the Asia-Pacific region. His particular area of interest is patent protection of advances in computer science and engineering, including computational finance, high-performance computing, and computational biology.
In addition to his research interests, Karl has broad industry experience across university technology development, intellectual property rights, and venture funding. He is an experienced US attorney and a registered patent lawyer with a technical background in computational sciences. Karl is founder and managing partner at incTANK Ventures, a venture capital fund investing in early stage, university-sourced technology companies. He is a founder of several Harvard and MIT startups, including Emergent Analytics a quantitative hedge fund developing science-based investment strategies; Agrivida, an agricultural biotechnology venture developing renewable fuels and chemicals from non-food cellulosic biomass; and MolySym, developing molecular modeling tools for research and education.
Karl’s holds a B.A. in economics from Colby College and a J.D. from Boston University. He was a Doctoral Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen and the University of Vienna (Austria) and went on to a post-doctoral position at the University of Tokyo where he was at both the Faculty of Law and the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology. Before joining the Asia Center Karl was a Fellow at MIT’s School of Engineering.
He has published numerous articles and book chapters on innovation and intellectual property rights, including Risk Management in Incubators in Management of Technology: Growth Through Business Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Management if Intellectual Property Rights: Challenges and Best Practices for New Technology Companies in IAMOT Proceedings (2004) and Intellectual Property Protection in University Startups, Annual Meetings of AIChE (2005).