Patents and Pending Patents: Women Inventors Working for DHS, both Federal Employees and Contractors

In honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2021, we wanted to highlight the women inventors working for DHS, both federal employees and contractors. To date, DHS has a total of eight women inventors who hold six patents. In addition, more than 20 inventions by DHS women are currently awaiting approval by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO).

For DHS, the ability to obtain patents for employee inventions provides an important vehicle for recognizing and rewarding the accomplishments of our employee inventors, fostering innovation, and promoting the commercialization of technologies that have been developed using federal resources. It also allows the Department to create defensive publications to help reduce the likelihood for others to obtain patents that dominate inventions first conceived of in DHS, and to show Congress and the public that DHS has a strong presence at the forefront of technologies critical to our missions.

The DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has had a significant role in promoting the work of all these inventive women. S&T manages the intellectual property program for all of DHS through a delegation from the Secretary, with the support of the intellectual property group of the Office of the General Counsel (OGC IP). Accordingly, S&T and OGC IP are responsible for every patent application filed in the USPTO.