Lisa Norton

With start-up experience, Lisa Norton joined CoMotion in 2004 and shares the massive responsibility of realizing the value of all UW innovations. Lisa wears two hats 1) overseeing all licensing and 2) guiding UW individuals and teams in their commercialization quest. For the purpose of this nomination, we will discuss Lisa’s impact on one UW group – the Rolling Stones – who were selected as the UW Inventor of the Year in 2025 and stand poised to be only the 5th major medical device company moving into production worldwide since the Covid Pandemic.

Our group invents ultrasound technologies and doesn’t know business. With decisions made before Lisa, our team had helped spin-off SonoSite for $1.5B without the UW receiving any money. Since, Lisa has helped us protect our ideas and in 2009, named us the Rolling Stones as we decided we would try to commercialize a new kidney stone treatment. We could break stones and reposition fragments on the benchtop. We needed Lisa’s help in every aspect of turning that into a company and a product to break stones and facilitate clearance with the urine in patients. Our spin-off company SonoMotion has obtained FDA clearance and entered the commercialization phase to produce devices, and UW stands to received significant financial return in royalties.

When we started this quest, Lisa gave us an article that it takes 17 years to bring a medical device to commercialization. We are now at 16 years. Lisa’s long-term commitment to UW and willingness to stay by our side for this whole journey alone should be rewarded. These start-up companies must all try to recruit her. In our team where probably over 50 people have contributed, Lisa has been consistent from the very start. CoMotion, itself, has changed names and form many times. Personnel have turned over at CoMotion and in the Rolling Stones. However the core of the Rolling Stones are funding entirely by federal grants, and we got to stay employed for 17 years with Lisa’s steady hand. If our work was not progressing toward commercialization, no one would have funded us. Now, we get to look back on a successful joyful career. There is additional joy that Lisa has maintained an objective history of what we did because quickly with success everyone’s recollections change. This is what we have done with our careers. This is it for us. This was all we had. We could not have done it without Lisa Norton. And we know we are just one of 1000 teams that Lisa has done this for in her 21 years at UW. Lisa helped in ways only she could where we could not have succeeded without her and so much of her effort was far beyond her job to license technology to a company.

Tell us why you are nominating this individual

We nominate Lisa for impact. In Question 3 we address her impact with our one project and here we discuss how Lisa helped us. In her role as our technology transfer officer, Lisa helped at the very outset through to today with patents, assembling a team and network, regulatory approval, funding, business planning, conflict of interest, and licensing the technology. Although she is incentivized solely by total number of licenses, she put in the extra effort to make the licenses successful so the company succeeded, the inventors got to do the research and publish, and the UW received financial return.

When we started, lawyers were selected by who was next in line. They apparently got paid by the job not the hour so they didn’t start until the last minute. Our own patents were used against us because our lawyers didn’t even know about our other patents. Lisa fixed all that, got us lawyers facile in ultrasound devices who have stayed with us throughout, and we have over 50 patents issued. Lisa found us several CEOs to choose from, introduced us to companies (one offered us a terms sheet), connected us with regulatory advisors, the resources at ITHS, created a board of directors for us, and took us to present in many business circles. Lisa supported us in several funding pitches, wrote letters of support, and identified funding opportunities, and established a first rights agreement when we couldn’t yet license the technology. Lisa helped us form a company to obtain grant funding: she found us a lawyer to incorporate the company, accountant to run the company, different accountants specifically for grant funding, and an expert in submitting small business grants. We needed a mannequin for an important demo, and Lisa was able to fund it. Small Business funding required development of a business plan: Lisa found us a student team for a business plan competition, and they won. Lisa and the team worked with our NASA funders to develop the business plan. Throughout Lisa helped us navigate any possible issues of conflict of interest.

Everything listed was above and beyond her job to submit our patents and license them, and significantly increased the impact for the UW. If the company failed like most start-up do, no one received anything, but Lisa did critical stuff she alone could to make it succeed.

The Rolling Stones are just one UW group. UW is #5 university of all the U.S. for licenses granted. Lisa is the Director of Licensing and since 2000 negotiated over 1800 licenses. The impact of these licenses on Washington state is $21B just since 2023 or $200B extrapolated over Lisa’s career.

The intellectual property licensed from UW is a major component of Washington State’s economy and funding of the university. UW is:

#1 Most innovative public university in the world

#7 Best university in U.S. for technology transfer

#23 Top worldwide universities granted U.S. utility patents

What makes this nominee worthy of the DSA?

We spent 15 years prior to 2009 publishing papers on how to treat kidney stones better and it really had no effect. Only when we met Lisa and decided to do it ourselves with her capable guidance did we start a path to make a difference. Our sole interest became changing medicine and how patients are treated by commercializing a product. Lisa gave us a reason to come to work excited for over 15 years. Our team grew and the energy and closeness grew under this common goal. In the end we created a noninvasive painless way to break kidney stones and sweep out the fragments, so they pass with the urine. It means that rather than try to manage your pain and hope you pass the stone and avoid surgery, doctors can now treat any stone right away when they first see it. No one has to wait in pain or anxiety. And 1 in 10 people have kidney stones. This is a big change in how people are treated, and it affects a lot of people. (We are also working a veterinary system and have treated 1 seal, 1 dolphin, 12 cats, 2 dogs and almost a goat.)

What Lisa meant for us was really that we had a job and a passion for over 15 years. We were very lucky. In addition, we also were successful and are close to having a useful product that helps people (and makes significant money for UW and others). We also did our job for NASA and gave NASA a device and evidence to downgrade the risk of stones in space. And we won accolades. We were 2025 UW Inventor of the year. We were the first team to sponsor and complete a medical device trial at UW. Now several others have followed the path Lisa helped us build. We did trials before starting the company which is popular now to decrease risk and increase value when the company takes on funding. We developed a staged protocol where we did one test to advance to the next one which is now is the standard. We are the first at UW to get a new medical device cleared by FDA. It was our UW human data alone that made FDA clearance possible for the start-up company. We each had individual successes, lab awards, a staff award, professional society awards, invited talks, press, board positions, publication in the New England Journal of Medicine, promotions, and new jobs.

And remember we are 1 of 1000 teams Lisa coached, and Lisa helped us share with others. We and Lisa coached colleagues looking to follow our path. Lisa also has presented talks to our colleagues not yet ready to commercialize but interested. Lisa helped a board member find a retirement career teaching entrepreneurship at UW. Lisa helped us coach remotely for years and host high school students from one of the poorest towns in American (Pahokee FL) for a medical device development internship.
Was there anything else?

We chose impact because Lisa changed care for anyone with a kidney stone and brought in millions of dollars to the UW, but Lisa would be an excellent candidate in any of the categories of excellence.

Collaboration and Innovation: Lisa’s whole career is creating value from innovations by creating collaborations. We talked about one company, but Lisa created collaboration and value any number of ways in addition to companies. Each innovation is by definition new, and Lisa has to innovate a unique path and collaborations for each team of innovators. For example, Lisa helped the Rolling Stones team complete human trials before starting a company.

Career achievement: Lisa has been in her role at UW for over 20 years. She has guided the Rolling Stones team alone for over 17 years. To bring value to the university often requires many years. We would not have succeeded without Lisa’s consistent guidance throughout. Lisa has focused on raising value for the UW, Washington State, and UW individuals and declined offers to leave and enrich herself.

Inclusion and belonging: Lisa helped create the Rolling Stones team and connect us with collaborators. This was a large diverse multidisciplinary network including patient volunteers. The more people a medical device helps the more value it has, and Lisa’s goal is to capture that value. We mentioned the Pahokee students; one of the highlights was actually UW host’s own stories of adversity and desires to pay it forward for help they had received from people like Lisa.

Lisa is a kind, fair, thoughtful person. We love working with Lisa. As the company SonoMotion runs on its own, we are scrambling to create new patents and start a new company to treat pets so we can keep working with Lisa in this sense of creating something valuable. There is satisfaction in success but mostly in the process of working together toward the worthy goal.

Lisa helps UW teams naïve to commercialization to mature their ideas and prepare them to move the ideas out of the university. She learns excruciating technical detail and guides a UW professional into how to make that idea be used. Lisa had to guide us from the most rudimentary starting point. She often had to translate for us. She would often step in answer something for us. Lisa met us for breakfasts and lunches to talk and arranged dinner with CEOs. She always paid for her own meal. She went to conferences with us on weekends. She established trust and a committed to supporting the team long term.

Lisa also negotiates licenses. She has an exceptional skill that leave all parties in the process happy because of the trust and commitment. Licenses are often about very important things: lots of money, government money, people’s careers and reputations, and the public good – and the parties feel very strongly about very different desires. Lisa makes solutions where everyone benefits, creates and environment where everyone is working together, and continues to provide support through renegotiation or whatever.

Michael Bailey
Senior Principal Engineer/ Professor (WOT)
APL/Mechanical Engineering