Rebecca L. Simmons, Ph.D.

Rebecca Simmons is a Patent Agent with the firm and assists with patent preparation and prosecution in the areas of biotechnology, chemistry, and pharmaceuticals. Rebecca has also assisted in patent litigation and the preparation of freedom to operate and invalidity opinions.

As a graduate student at Harvard University, she developed a strategy for bioconjugation based on the synthesis of a stable, biotin-tagged organopalladium(II) reagent that reacts with alkene-containing probes in complex proteomic mixtures and used the approach to isolate the known protein targets of two natural products in pull-down experiments.    

Prior to completing her Ph.D., Rebecca worked in the Research Division at Hitachi Global Storage Technology where she used fluid dynamics to organize silicon sliders into a grid for recognition by tools in the process lab. Her undergraduate research as a laboratory assistant included assessing the chemoselectivity of a series of cross metathesis reactions catalyzed by the Hoveyda–Grubbs metathesis catalyst at Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris, France, and she also focused on understanding the reactivity preferences of Mo-based metathesis catalysts and extended Grubbs’ model of selective Ru-catalyzed cross metathesis to the Mo-based catalysts at Boston College.

Rebecca also has experience working at IBM in the Storage Technology Division. She worked as part of a team of development and manufacturing scientists that optimized the Damascene copper plating bath composition for plating coil structures in thin film magnetic recording heads. She also calibrated the Veeco XRF to measure plated palladium and assessed the potential for implementing this tool into the manufacturing line in terms of robustness, reproducibility, and precision.

Rebecca has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Eli Lilly Organic Chemistry Fellowship, Robert B. Woodward Fellow, Fulbright Foreign Scholarship, Presidential Scholarship Program, and the IBM Thomas J. Watson Memorial Scholarship Award. She is also a member of the French National Honor Society and is fluent in French. 

Rebecca is a co-inventor of U.S. Patent 200708995 A1, “Damascene Copper Plating for Coils in Thin Film Heads,” and she has also co-authored a publication that appeared in Organic Letters. 

Professional Associations
Phi Beta Kappa
Phi Delta Phi