Ag Business/Economics major Dakota Hoben was recently voted Government of the Student Body President for the 2011-2012 school year.

Hoben, a senior who served in the student Senate for two years, and says that the focus for his coming term will be on "active engagement" with the student body.

“I really believe in serving constituents and bringing their ideas to the forefront,” says Hoben. He and Vice President Jared Knight will attend two campus club meetings per month as part of their outreach strategy, and request student Senators make a similar commitment.

"I think the reason why people supported us is that we really made an effort to be amongst the student body rather than holding ourselves above,” he says. “Our role is really to serve as an outlet for communication.”

One issue that Hoben will work on is changing testing policies during “dead week.” During the campaign, he says many students talked to him about their frustration that the week is often used for additional testing, when the time is intended for final exam preparation. “It’s too stressful for students to manage both,” he says.

He'll also continue to make progress on projects started by the previous administration, including the rollout of a student financial literacy program, communications regarding Campustown changes, and ongoing conversations over tuition increases with the Board of Regents.

Hoben is originally from Grandview, Iowa. He plans to enter the agribusiness industry when he graduates, but with a new focus on governance, he’s also considering possible work in ag policy. “I enjoy serving as an advocate,” he says.

Kyriakos Drivas will complete his PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California-Berkeley. The focus of his dissertation has been on the management of university technologies, and descriptive findings have been published by the National Academy of Sciences. He has presented at a number of conferences, acted as a reviewer for Applied Economics and European Review of Agricultural Economics. He has published on the subject of cooperatives in the Journal of Agricultural Economics and the Journal of Rural Cooperation, and on political economy/finance in Ekonomia.

Abstract: This project tries to assess the role of exclusive licensing in diffusion of academic patented inventions. The metric for follow-on research employed is the patent citations the academic patent receives. This projects tests two long standing hypotheses/beliefs that are at the core of the discussion regarding the management of academic technologies. Namely, whether exclusive licensing motivates licensees to undertake research on the academic patent and whether exclusive licensing discourages non-licensees to use the knowledge embedded in the academic patent. Results show that exclusive licensing increases licensee citations regardless of the technology field; in addition start-up licensees conduct more follow-on research than established firms licensees implying the involvement of the primary inventor in the start-up. Finally licensees acquire patents mainly in the same narrow technology field as the academic patent they build on. Moreover, we find that exclusive licensing increases non-licensee citations and therefore we conclude that this type of technology transfer functions as a signal to other firms rather as a discouraging factor. This signal may be of the quality of the patent and/or information that a competitor is working on a new research path and therefore other firms should also pursue this research agenda; we provide evidence to support the signaling explanation. We find that the increase of non-licensee citations is more prevalent for computers, communications, electronics and engineering related patents while we also find that non-licensees invent around the academic patent or use it in entirely different technology fields.

• Ruiqing Miao will present an Agricultural Economics Workshop/Econ 693 on the topic "Investment in Cellulosic Biofuel Refineries: Do Biofuel Mandates Matter?" on Wednesday, April 20, 4:10 - 5:30 pm, 368A Heady Hall.