Alan Bennett joined the faculty at the University of California, Davis in 1983. From 2000-2004, Bennett served as the Executive Director of the University of California Systemwide Office of Technology Transfer and Research Administration where he was responsible for the Intellectual Property management and research policy for the University of California system. This included management of a portfolio of over 5000 cases, 700 active licenses and revenue in excess of $350MM.

From 2004-2008, Alan Bennett served as the Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Davis where he founded and managed InnovationAccess, an organization responsible for technology transfer, business development and support for technology-based economic development in the Sacramento | Davis region. InnovationAccess helped start up 25 companies based on UC Davis research, setting a record for support of entrepreneurship in the region. He also currently serves as the founding Executive Director of the Rockefeller Foundation-supported “Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture (PIPRA)”, an organization of 49 universities dedicated to the collective management of ntellectual property to support broad commercial innovation and humanitarian uses of agricultural technologies.

Bennett is a Fellow of the California Council for Science and Technology (CCST), a science policy advisory council for the State of California, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He also currently serves as a member of the U.S. National Academies' of Science Committee on University Management of Intellectual Property. Bennett earned his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Plant Biology at UC Davis and Cornell University, respectively and has published over 150 research papers in leading scientific journals and holds several utility patents related to crop quality traits.