If You Serve on a Board of Directors
- Service on a board of directors carries with it legal fiduciary responsibility but generally not line management responsibility (which is prohibited under Stanford policy) and hence, is generally permissible. However, your primary commitment is to the University and your service on a Board of Directors should not conflict with that obligation or conflict with any other university rules or regulations.
- You are not allowed to serve in various 'director' roles in a company, for example, Director of Research, Chief Scientific Officer, Director of Clinical Labs, and the like. Such titles imply management responsibilities and are perceived as such, irrespective of actual job description.
- If you are also the principal investigator of a research project you have fiduciary responsibility for the grant or contract. If you have fiduciary responsibility as the Principal Investigator (PI) on Stanford research and have fiduciary responsibility as a Member of the Board--how do you plan to separate these two obligations?
- Your relationship to the company should not interfere with your primary obligations as a faculty member or University employee.
- You must avoid any conflict of commitment between your University responsibilities and your relationship with a company.
- You must keep your financial interests as separate from your research and University obligations in order to:
- protect your students, trainees, and others whom you are responsible for directing from undue influences or the compromise of academic freedoms;
- preserve the integrity of the research;
- cause no harm to human subjects used in your research; and
- see that any creations or discoveries that arise during the course of your research or scholarly activities are not pipelined to the company, and are disclosed in a timely fashion to the Office of Technology Licensing.
- If you also have a formal consulting agreement, see CONSULT .
- You must disclose this relationship with the company in publications and public discussions of any of your research that is sponsored by the company or related to the company.
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