Kathleen McDonald has made exceptional contributions to advancing the transfer of federally developed technologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Her leadership spans diverse and high-impact domains — national security and space, nuclear, quantum, and fusion — where she has spearheaded strategic partnerships, licensing, and innovative approaches to technology transfer. Her robust portfolio development directly enabled commercialization opportunities, and she has negotiated and managed numerous CRADAs, including more than eight umbrella CRADAs, many supporting five or more project task statements.

McDonald strengthened her broader technology transfer community through training. She has co-led the FLC’s national training course, “T2 for the ORTA,” which equips new professionals across the federal complex with the skills to navigate agreements, intellectual property management, and commercialization pathways. Internally at LANL, she mentors and trains both technical staff and technology transfer professionals, ensuring knowledge continuity and fostering a culture of innovation engagement.

McDonald’s superpower is in creatively advancing technology transfer with novel approaches to intellectual property strategy that go beyond traditional patent-focused models. Especially noteworthy is her ability to develop new frameworks for dataset protection and to pioneer copyright-based licensing strategies for nuclear safeguards technologies. McDonald recognized a critical gap in how federally generated datasets were managed and transferred, and she led efforts with LANL to create a path for protecting and licensing laboratory datasets, which is particularly significant for domains such as fusion and AI. Historically, lab data was either released publicly or remained controlled, with no mechanism to balance protection with commercialization. By working closely with the LANL Office of General Counsel, McDonald helped catalyze ongoing efforts to establish department-wide mechanisms that both safeguard sensitive data from foreign adversaries and enable U.S. industry to capitalize on the investments. This innovative approach is poised to become a new model of technology transfer, ensuring that data itself — one of the most valuable products of federally funded research — can directly fuel U.S. innovation and competitiveness.

McDonald led the implementation of a dual-licensing strategy for LANL software code that ultimately resulted in a successful commercial license with a Fortune 500 company. The software was initially released under a hereditary open-source license, which required that any modifications be distributed under the same terms. McDonald recognized that this presented a barrier to certain partners, and she structured the dual-version licensing model to be available for all kinds of users.

That type of creative thinking — applying dual-licensing to a national laboratory environment — shows McDonald’s willingness to bridge open-source accessibility with proprietary licensing requirements and exemplifies her innovative approach to technology transfer.