With a career spanning three decades, Lita Nelsen became one of the most influential power brokers in the drug industry, yet at the same time she remained essentially anonymous.

That’s because she ran one of the country’s largest and most successful technology-transfer offices, an unglamorous yet vital go-between for universities and startups. And any time a venture capitalist, a pharmaceutical company, or a tech titan wanted to cash in on an invention at MIT, the path went through Nelsen. Only bolstering her legacy is that she shattered the glass ceiling for women in tech transfer and became a vocal champion for egalitarianism in science.

“Her insights are invaluable,’’ said Katharine Ku, head of Stanford University’s office of technology licensing. “Lita has been a beacon for the tech transfer community.’’

Nelsen retired in April, after 30 years at the helm of the MIT technology licensing office.

Because of her work, that office now handles about 90 licensing deals and launches roughly 25 companies each year, many of which set up shop around Kendall Square, providing Nelsen constant reminders of the weight of her work.

“You walk down the street and you say, ‘Well, I remember when that one was born, and I remember when that one was born,’?’’ Nelsen said on her last day at MIT.

Nelsen will hand over the reins to Lesley Millar-Nicholson, her counterpart at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, closing out her final days at MIT in a cleaned-out office with just a computer and a plant that was too heavy to move.

Millar-Nicholson praised her predecessor’s balance of expertise and accessibility. “There are some whose approach to [tech transfer] involves them becoming bigger than the profession — a lot of bling not a lot of substance,’’ Millar-Nicholson wrote in an e-mail. “Lita was never that.’’

Nelsen’s pioneering career dovetailed with the rise of universities as breeding grounds for entrepreneurialism, seeded by a landmark piece of legislation that transformed American industry.

Before 1980, the patents to any invention stemming from government-funded research were owned solely by the government itself, a system that left potentially promising technology mothballed in federal vaults. After the passage of that year’s Bayh-Dole Act, however, the United States conferred those rights onto the universities and researchers responsible for the actual labor of development, freeing them to cut deals as they pleased and spurring an explosion of creation.

Nelsen arrived at the technology licensing office as that boom was in its infancy, and universities around the country were debating whether, as Nelsen put it, “the grubby fingerprints of the industry would soil the ivory tower of academia.’’

MIT was different. Unlike the schools of the Ivy League, descended from medieval traditions of academia, it was founded to bring science to industry, the arts, and agriculture. This, Nelsen said, gave it a head start on the coming boom of entrepreneurialism — and over the ensuing years, Nelsen’s office grew to become the standard-bearer in the emerging field of tech transfer.

Universities around the country sought to emulate what MIT created, and Nelsen, the public face of the licensing office, became a mentor to her counterparts around the world. Nelsen took up tech transfer after a decade in industry, returning to the university of her student days. Arriving as an undergraduate in 1960 to study chemical engineering, she found that just 2 percent of the MIT student body was female — and so she and her friends made a song:

Outnumbered one in 50, I think it’s kind of nifty, with 49 fellas and me.

Things have since improved. Roughly one-third of MIT’s undergraduates were female when Nelsen’s daughter enrolled in the 1980s, she said, and that number now stands at 46 percent.

As she walks away, Nelsen takes special joy in the sheer amount of stuff that came out of her office. Drugs, gadgets, software — each a reminder of the collaborative spirit that kept her coming to work each day.

Damian Garde can be reached at damian.garde@statnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @damiangarde. Follow Stat on Twitter: @statnews.