Director, Asia & Latin American Program, Inter-American Dialogue
Margaret Myers is director of the Asia & Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, adjunct researcher with the Núcleo Milenio sobre los Impactos de China en América Latina (ICLAC), and a senior advisor to the United States Institute of Peace. She established the Dialogue’s China and Latin America Working Group in 2011 to examine China’s growing presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Myers also developed the China-Latin America Finance Database, the first publicly available source of empirical data on Chinese state lending in Latin America, in cooperation with Global China Initiative at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
In addition to maintaining the Dialogue’s China and Latin America and 美洲对话 blogs, Myers has published numerous articles on Chinese leadership dynamics, international capital flows, Chinese agricultural policy, and Asia-Latin America relations, among other topics. The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations and The Changing Currents of Trans-Pacific Integration: China, the TPP, and Beyond, her co-edited volumes with Dr. Carol Wise and Dr. Adrian Hearn, respectively, were published in 2016. Myers has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Senate Finance and Foreign Relations Committees, and the US-China Security and Economic Commission on the China-Latin America relationship. She is also regularly featured in major domestic and international media, including the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, El Comercio, El País, Folha de São Paulo, CNN en Español, and BBC. In 2018, she was identified by Global Americans as part of the “new generation of public intellectuals.”
Before arriving at the Dialogue, Myers worked as a Latin America analyst and China analyst for the US Department of Defense, during which time she was deployed with the US Navy in support of Partnership of the Americas. Myers has also worked as a senior China analyst for Science Applications International Corporation; a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank; a faculty member at Georgetown University, the George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS; a mentor for the Indian Foreign Policy Research Institute’s School of Foreign Policy; and for Fauquier County Schools, where she developed the county’s first Mandarin language program. Myers received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and conducted her graduate work at The George Washington University, Zhejiang University of Technology, and the Johns Hopkins University/Nanjing University Center for Chinese-American Studies. Myers was a Council on Foreign Relations term member. She was also the recipient of a Freeman fellowship for China studies, a Fulbright Specialist grant to research China-Colombia relations in Bogotá, and a Woodrow Wilson Center fellowship to write a forthcoming book on China-Latin America relations.
Judicial Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Nitin is a recent graduate of Cornell Law School. Before his time in Ithaca, he majored in International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and focused on power competition in South Asia during his graduate studies at the University of Oxford.
Senior Fellow, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Mihaela Papa is a Senior Fellow at the Fletcher School, where she has co-founded and led the Rising Power Alliances project and served as faculty in sustainable development and global governance.
Papa is an expert in negotiation strategy and coalition building, with a focus on BRICS and the transition to sustainability. She started her BRICS research as postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Law School and a visiting scholar at Fudan University's Center for BRICS Studies. Her recent publications analyze BRICS convergence and BRICS-US relations (EJIR, 2023), whether BRICS can de-dollarize global finance (CUP 2022 and ISA-West award), and BRICS resilience (Global Policy 2021). Her publications on environmental foreign policy, climate diplomacy, and global governance appeared in Global Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Change, Climate Policy, and other journals. Her commentary was featured in Foreign Affairs and The Conversation, as well as on CNN, Bloomberg, BBC, AP, News24, the South China Morning Post, and other media outlets.
Papa is also an active practitioner with a proven track record advising institutions on global strategies and leading international collaborations and programs, including at MIT and the Croatian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She served as a consultant for the U.S. government, the European Commission, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Originally a trade economist with a BA from Croatia, she completed her MA in Law and Diplomacy and PhD in International Relations at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law
Hon. Kenneth L. Marcus is an internationally recognized expert in civil and human rights, as well as a leader in the fight against anti-Semitism on and off university campuses. He is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the leading civil rights legal organization fighting against anti-Semitism. The New York Times has called him “The Man Who Helped Redefine Campus Anti-Semitism.” He been described, in that paper, as “the single most effective and respected force” to combat anti-Semitism.
During his public service career, Marcus served as Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education for Civil Rights; Staff Director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; and General Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
In academia, he serves as Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University. He formerly held the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America at the City University of New York’s Bernard M. Baruch College, served as Visiting Research Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University, and was a Board of Visitors member George Mason University and Distinguished Senior Fellow at that university’s law school. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and previously served as Associate Editor of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
Marcus is also author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press) and Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press). He has published widely in academic journals as well as in more popular venues such as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, and Politico. He is a graduate of Williams College and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Earlier in his career, he was a litigation partner in two major law firms, where he conducted complex commercial and constitutional litigation. He also serves as Chairman emeritus of the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Civil Rights Practice Group.
Partner, Fusion Law, PLLC
Paul is the founding partner of Fusion Law, PLLC. He has extensive experience with state, federal, and global regulators building coalitions and implementing policies to promote innovation in financial services. He is responsible for designing and implementing the first state (Arizona) and federal (CFPB) FinTech sandboxes in the United States. He also designed the CFPB no-action letter and trial disclosure policies. He helped found the first global regulatory innovation coalition (Global Financial Innovation Network) and led the founding of the first U.S. regulatory innovation coalition (American Consumer Financial Innovation Network). He served on the Financial Stability Oversight Council subcommittee on digital assets. He also has drafted state-level laws on blockchain and utility tokens.
Paul also has significant enforcement and litigation experience. He led many multi-state consumer protection enforcement matters as Civil Litigation Division Chief at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
Prior to his government service, Paul practiced law in the areas of securities litigation and transactional work for approximately six years at two well-known law firms. He also clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Legal Counsel, Alliance Defending Freedom
Kathleen Barceleau serves as legal counsel for Allied Legal Affairs and Advocacy Strategy at Alliance Defending Freedom. In that role, she works to coordinate and deploy network attorneys to further ADF’s mission and conducts research in support of ADF’s strategic plans.
Before joining ADF, Barceleau was Of Counsel at Fusion Law, where she focused on financial regulation and policy issues. Previously, she served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Kansas, where she represented Kansas and its officials in civil rights and constitutional litigation in both state and federal courts. She also served as a law clerk to the Hon. Robert H. Cleland on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Barceleau received her J.D. summa cum laude from Ave Maria School of Law. She is a 2016 Blackstone Fellow. Before law school, Barceleau graduated summa cum laude from Ave Maria University with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics and Early Christian Literature and Economics. Barceleau is admitted to the state bar of Michigan.
Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Andrei Iancu is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and one of the leading voices in intellectual property law and innovation policy. He is a former Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a position to which he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Andrei has decades of experience representing plaintiffs and defendants in IP matters across the technical and scientific spectra, including medical devices, genetic testing, therapeutics, the Internet, telephony, TV broadcasting, video game systems and computer peripherals. He represents clients in litigation and trials before the district courts, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the USPTO, the Federal Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court, and also counsels clients on obtaining, licensing, enforcing and defending against IP rights globally.
Partner, Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP
David J. Kappos is a partner at Cravath. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost leaders in the field of intellectual property, including intellectual property management and strategy, the development of global intellectual property norms, laws and practices as well as commercialization and enforcement of innovation-based assets. Mr. Kappos supports the Firm’s clients with a wide range of their most complex intellectual property issues, including those pertaining to blockchain and financial technology (FinTech).
From August 2009 to January 2013, Mr. Kappos served as Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that role, he advised the President, the Secretary of Commerce and the Administration on intellectual property policy matters. As Director of the USPTO, he led the Agency in dramatically re-engineering its entire management and operational systems as well as its engagement with the global innovation community. He was instrumental in achieving the greatest legislative reform of the U.S. patent system in generations through passage and implementation of the Leahy‑Smith America Invents Act, signed into law by President Obama in September 2011.
Prior to leading the USPTO, Mr. Kappos held several executive posts in the legal department of IBM, the world’s largest patent holder. From 2003 to 2009, he served as the company’s chief intellectual property lawyer. In that capacity, he managed global intellectual property activities for IBM, including all aspects of patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret protection. Mr. Kappos joined IBM as a development engineer. During his more than 25 years at IBM, he served in a variety of roles including litigation counsel and Asia Pacific IP counsel, based in Tokyo, Japan, where he led all aspects of intellectual property protection, including licensing, transactions support and mergers and acquisitions activity for the Asia/Pacific region.
Mr. Kappos has received numerous accolades for his contributions to the field of intellectual property, including, among others, the 2014 Global Agenda Council Vision Award for the Intellectual Property Council’s pro bono initiative from the World Economic Forum, the 2014 Jefferson Medal from the New Jersey Intellectual Property Law Association (NJIPLA), the 2013 Board of Director’s Excellence Award from the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), the 2013 Champion of Intellectual Property Award from the District of Columbia Bar Association and the 2013 North America Government Leadership Award from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI). He was named one of the “Top 25 Icons of IP” by Law360, one of the “50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property” and the “Outstanding Practitioner of the Year in IP Transactions” by Managing IP, one of the “Top 50 Intellectual Property Trailblazers & Pioneers” and one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America” by The National Law Journal, “Intellectual Property Professional of the Year” by the Intellectual Property Owners Association and inducted into the Intellectual Property Hall of Fame by Intellectual Asset Management Magazine in 2012. Mr. Kappos was also recognized as a leading lawyer by IAM Strategy 300, IAM Patent 1000, World IP Review, The Legal 500 US, Who’s Who Legal: Patents, Lawdragon, Super Lawyers and The Best Lawyers in America. He is a frequent speaker and has authored many published articles on various intellectual property, innovation and leadership topics.
Mr. Kappos serves on the Boards of Directors of the Partnership for Public Service, the Center for Global Enterprise and the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation. He is the Chair of the Advisory Council of the Naples Roundtable, and the U.S. Chair of the U.S.-China IP Cooperation Dialogue. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, where he teaches copyright litigation, and Cornell Law School, where he teaches legal advising for the start-up general counsel.
Mr. Kappos was born in Palos Verdes, California. He received a B.S. summa cum laude in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1983 and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.
Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law
Arti Rai, Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law and co-Director, Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy, is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property (IP) law, administrative law, and health policy. Rai has also taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania law schools. Rai's research on IP law and policy in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and software has been funded by NIH, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has published over 50 articles, essays, and book chapters on IP law, administrative law, and health policy. Her publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Columbia, Georgetown, and Northwestern law reviews. She is the editor of Intellectual Property Law and Biotechnology: Critical Concepts (Edward Elgar, 2011) and the co-author of a 2012 Kauffman Foundation monograph on cost-effective health care innovation.
From 2009-2010, Rai served as the Administrator of the Office of External Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As External Affairs Administrator, Rai led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. Prior to that time, she had served on President-Elect Obama’s transition team reviewing the USPTO. Prior to entering academia, Rai clerked for the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; was a litigation associate at Jenner & Block (doing patent litigation as well as other litigation); and was a litigator at the Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.
Rai regularly testifies before Congress and relevant administrative bodies on IP law and policy issues and regularly advises federal agencies on IP policy issues raised by the research that they fund. She is a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and of an Expert Advisory Council to the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA). Rai is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the American Law Institute, and co-chair of the IP Committee of the Administrative Law Section of the ABA. Rai is currently a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Strategies for Responsible Sharing of Clinical Trial Data and has served on, or as a reviewer for, numerous National Academies of Science committees. In 2011, Rai won the World Technology Network Award for Law.
Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991. Rai's moot court team at Harvard Law School won Best Brief and Team honors at the school's prestigious Ames Moot Court Competition.
Professor of Law and Director, Intellectual Property and Information Law Program, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
Saurabh Vishnubhakat is a Professor of Law and Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Law Program at Cardozo Law. He is also a Research Fellow at the Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy and a Senior Scholar at the George Mason University Center for IP and Innovation Policy. Previously, he held joint appointments as a Professor of Law and Professor of Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Professor Vishnubhakat’s expertise is in intellectual property, administrative law and federal litigation, especially from an empirical perspective. His legal writings have been cited in federal judicial opinions, agency regulations and over two dozen Supreme Court briefs. His latest work is published or forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal, the Washington and Lee Law Review and the Iowa Law Review as well as the peer-reviewed Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
His research explores the interaction of the U.S. intellectual property system with federal courts and agencies, among other topics. With a background in the natural sciences, Professor Vishnubhakat brings a scientific mindset to legal thinking and is dedicated to teaching students how to build arguments with analytical rigor.
Prior to his appointment at Texas A&M, Professor Vishnubhakat served in the United States Patent and Trademark Office as principal legal advisor to that agency’s first two chief economists. He was also a faculty fellow at Duke Law School, where he co-taught patent law and was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke Center for Public Genomics, where he researched law and policy issues surrounding innovation in genetics and biomedicine.
Professor Vishnubhakat holds both a J.D. and LL.M. in intellectual property from the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review. He also holds a B.S. in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is admitted to the bars of Texas, Illinois, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Andrei Iancu is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and one of the leading voices in intellectual property law and innovation policy. He is a former Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a position to which he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Andrei has decades of experience representing plaintiffs and defendants in IP matters across the technical and scientific spectra, including medical devices, genetic testing, therapeutics, the Internet, telephony, TV broadcasting, video game systems and computer peripherals. He represents clients in litigation and trials before the district courts, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the USPTO, the Federal Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court, and also counsels clients on obtaining, licensing, enforcing and defending against IP rights globally.
Partner, Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP
David J. Kappos is a partner at Cravath. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost leaders in the field of intellectual property, including intellectual property management and strategy, the development of global intellectual property norms, laws and practices as well as commercialization and enforcement of innovation-based assets. Mr. Kappos supports the Firm’s clients with a wide range of their most complex intellectual property issues, including those pertaining to blockchain and financial technology (FinTech).
From August 2009 to January 2013, Mr. Kappos served as Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that role, he advised the President, the Secretary of Commerce and the Administration on intellectual property policy matters. As Director of the USPTO, he led the Agency in dramatically re-engineering its entire management and operational systems as well as its engagement with the global innovation community. He was instrumental in achieving the greatest legislative reform of the U.S. patent system in generations through passage and implementation of the Leahy‑Smith America Invents Act, signed into law by President Obama in September 2011.
Prior to leading the USPTO, Mr. Kappos held several executive posts in the legal department of IBM, the world’s largest patent holder. From 2003 to 2009, he served as the company’s chief intellectual property lawyer. In that capacity, he managed global intellectual property activities for IBM, including all aspects of patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret protection. Mr. Kappos joined IBM as a development engineer. During his more than 25 years at IBM, he served in a variety of roles including litigation counsel and Asia Pacific IP counsel, based in Tokyo, Japan, where he led all aspects of intellectual property protection, including licensing, transactions support and mergers and acquisitions activity for the Asia/Pacific region.
Mr. Kappos has received numerous accolades for his contributions to the field of intellectual property, including, among others, the 2014 Global Agenda Council Vision Award for the Intellectual Property Council’s pro bono initiative from the World Economic Forum, the 2014 Jefferson Medal from the New Jersey Intellectual Property Law Association (NJIPLA), the 2013 Board of Director’s Excellence Award from the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), the 2013 Champion of Intellectual Property Award from the District of Columbia Bar Association and the 2013 North America Government Leadership Award from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI). He was named one of the “Top 25 Icons of IP” by Law360, one of the “50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property” and the “Outstanding Practitioner of the Year in IP Transactions” by Managing IP, one of the “Top 50 Intellectual Property Trailblazers & Pioneers” and one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America” by The National Law Journal, “Intellectual Property Professional of the Year” by the Intellectual Property Owners Association and inducted into the Intellectual Property Hall of Fame by Intellectual Asset Management Magazine in 2012. Mr. Kappos was also recognized as a leading lawyer by IAM Strategy 300, IAM Patent 1000, World IP Review, The Legal 500 US, Who’s Who Legal: Patents, Lawdragon, Super Lawyers and The Best Lawyers in America. He is a frequent speaker and has authored many published articles on various intellectual property, innovation and leadership topics.
Mr. Kappos serves on the Boards of Directors of the Partnership for Public Service, the Center for Global Enterprise and the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation. He is the Chair of the Advisory Council of the Naples Roundtable, and the U.S. Chair of the U.S.-China IP Cooperation Dialogue. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, where he teaches copyright litigation, and Cornell Law School, where he teaches legal advising for the start-up general counsel.
Mr. Kappos was born in Palos Verdes, California. He received a B.S. summa cum laude in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1983 and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.
Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law
Arti Rai, Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law and co-Director, Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy, is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property (IP) law, administrative law, and health policy. Rai has also taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania law schools. Rai's research on IP law and policy in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and software has been funded by NIH, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has published over 50 articles, essays, and book chapters on IP law, administrative law, and health policy. Her publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Columbia, Georgetown, and Northwestern law reviews. She is the editor of Intellectual Property Law and Biotechnology: Critical Concepts (Edward Elgar, 2011) and the co-author of a 2012 Kauffman Foundation monograph on cost-effective health care innovation.
From 2009-2010, Rai served as the Administrator of the Office of External Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As External Affairs Administrator, Rai led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. Prior to that time, she had served on President-Elect Obama’s transition team reviewing the USPTO. Prior to entering academia, Rai clerked for the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; was a litigation associate at Jenner & Block (doing patent litigation as well as other litigation); and was a litigator at the Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.
Rai regularly testifies before Congress and relevant administrative bodies on IP law and policy issues and regularly advises federal agencies on IP policy issues raised by the research that they fund. She is a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and of an Expert Advisory Council to the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA). Rai is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the American Law Institute, and co-chair of the IP Committee of the Administrative Law Section of the ABA. Rai is currently a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Strategies for Responsible Sharing of Clinical Trial Data and has served on, or as a reviewer for, numerous National Academies of Science committees. In 2011, Rai won the World Technology Network Award for Law.
Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991. Rai's moot court team at Harvard Law School won Best Brief and Team honors at the school's prestigious Ames Moot Court Competition.
Professor of Law and Director, Intellectual Property and Information Law Program, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
Saurabh Vishnubhakat is a Professor of Law and Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Law Program at Cardozo Law. He is also a Research Fellow at the Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy and a Senior Scholar at the George Mason University Center for IP and Innovation Policy. Previously, he held joint appointments as a Professor of Law and Professor of Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Professor Vishnubhakat’s expertise is in intellectual property, administrative law and federal litigation, especially from an empirical perspective. His legal writings have been cited in federal judicial opinions, agency regulations and over two dozen Supreme Court briefs. His latest work is published or forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal, the Washington and Lee Law Review and the Iowa Law Review as well as the peer-reviewed Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
His research explores the interaction of the U.S. intellectual property system with federal courts and agencies, among other topics. With a background in the natural sciences, Professor Vishnubhakat brings a scientific mindset to legal thinking and is dedicated to teaching students how to build arguments with analytical rigor.
Prior to his appointment at Texas A&M, Professor Vishnubhakat served in the United States Patent and Trademark Office as principal legal advisor to that agency’s first two chief economists. He was also a faculty fellow at Duke Law School, where he co-taught patent law and was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke Center for Public Genomics, where he researched law and policy issues surrounding innovation in genetics and biomedicine.
Professor Vishnubhakat holds both a J.D. and LL.M. in intellectual property from the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review. He also holds a B.S. in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is admitted to the bars of Texas, Illinois, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Distinguished University Professor of Global Affairs and Director, Center for Global Economic and Environmental Opportunity, University of Central Florida
James Bacchus is the Distinguished University Professor of Global Affairs and Director of the Center for Global Economic and Environmental Opportunity at the University of Central Florida. He was a founding judge and was twice the Chairman – the chief judge – of the highest court of world trade, the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a former Member of the Congress of the United States, from Florida, and also a former international trade negotiator for the United States. He is a Global Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada and an Adjunct Scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He is the Pao Yue – Kong Chair Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. He served on the High-Level Advisory Panel to the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, chairs the global Commission on Trade and Investment Policy of the International Chamber of Commerce, and chaired the global sustainability council of the World Economic Forum. For more than fourteen years, he chaired the global practice of the largest law firm in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Professor Bacchus is the author of the books Trade and Freedom, published by Cameron May in London in 2004, and The Willing World: Shaping and Sharing a Sustainable Global Prosperity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The Financial Times named The Willing World one of the “Best Books of 2018.” He is a frequent writer in leading publications and a frequent speaker on prominent platforms worldwide on numerous topics relating to international law and international political economy.
Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law
Professor Baker teaches disability discrimination law, negotiations and a new course on human rights, intellectual property, and access to medicines. He taught and consulted in South African law schools and law school clinics between 1997-2012. Professor Baker is an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa.
Professor Baker is also a senior policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and is actively engaged in campaigns for universal access to treatment, prevention, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially expanded and improved medical treatment. More recently he has been working on accelerating research on and equitable global access to vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has written and consulted extensively on intellectual property rights, trade, investor-state dispute settlement, access to medicines, and medicines regulatory policy, including with the African Union, NEPAD, South Africa, Uganda, ASEAN, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, CARICOM, UK DfID, the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Goals Project, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Open Society Institute, UNAIDS, UNDP, Unitaid, the Medicines Patent Pool, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and others. He has served as a key, alternative board member and board member of the NGO delegation to Unitaid, which acts to improve market dynamics and early market entry of medicines and diagnostics needed to address HIV/AIDS, TB, Hepatitis C and malaria. He presently is a civil society representative to the Therapeutics Pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Acclerator.
Professor Baker also works on policy issues concerning the Global Fund and the US PEPFAR Program, and how those priority disease initiatives might contribute more broadly to improving health care delivery in developing countries. Finally, he analyzes resource needs for global health, innovative financing mechanisms and IMF macroeconomic policies that restrict increased government and donor spending on health and education in developing countries.
James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law & Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law
Jorge L. Contreras is a Distinguished University Professor, the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. He teaches and researches in the areas of intellectual property, property law, technical standardization, antitrust and science policy. In 2020 he received the University of Utah's Distinguished Research Award and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has testified before the U.S. Senate and House Subcommittees on Intellectual Property, and was awarded the Rossman Memorial Award by the Patent & Trademark Office Society in 2022.
Professor Contreras has written or edited fourteen books and published more than 150 scholarly articles and chapters. His book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (NY: Hachette/Algonquin, 2021), has been praised by the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, Nature and numerous other outlets, and was named "Best Patent Law Book of the Year" by the international IPKat blog. His scholarly articles have appeared in leading scientific, legal and policy journals including Science, Nature, NYU Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Iowa Law Review and Antitrust Law Journal. He has been quoted by media outlets around the world including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Korea Times and has been featured on C-SPAN, NPR, PRI and BBC shows and a range of podcasts and online news programs.
Professor Contreras currently serves Co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary Division of the ABA's Section of Science & Technology Law and a member of the Advisory Board of the American Antitrust Institute. He has previously served as Co-Chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Council of Councils, the Advisory Council of NIH's National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS), the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and the Intellectual Property Rights Policy Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). In 2021 he served as Chair of the Art Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and currently serves as Chair of the AALS Remedies Section.
Professor Contreras has previously taught at American University Washington College of Law and Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to entering academia he was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where he practiced transactional and intellectual property law in Boston, London and Washington DC. He is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (JD) and Rice University (BA, BSEE) and clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Philips of the Texas Supreme Court.
Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University School of Law
Rutschman has published and presented widely on topics related to health law, food and drug regulation, intellectual property, innovation in the life sciences, and law and technology. Recent presentations have covered topics related to vaccines and other biotechnologies, healthcare blockchain, e-health and artificial intelligence in medicine. Her legal scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in UCLA Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Arizona Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Michigan Law Review Online, Annals of Health Law and Duke Law and Technology Review, among others. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, the American Journal of Infection Control and Emerging Infectious Diseases. Her commentary pieces have been published by The Huffington Post and The Conversation and reprinted in Scientific American, Newsweek Japan and newspapers around the U.S., including the Chicago Tribune. Her ongoing book, Vaccines as Technology: Innovation, Barriers and the Public Interest, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
CoFounder, RightsClick
Steven’s extensive background in IP law and policy began as an attorney for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, after which, he served as senior counsel for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office and then as Chief Intellectual Property Counsel for the Global Intellectual Property Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Before co-founding RightsClick, he started the IP consultancy Sentinel Worldwide, and teaches copyright law at George Washington University Law School.
Distinguished University Professor of Global Affairs and Director, Center for Global Economic and Environmental Opportunity, University of Central Florida
James Bacchus is the Distinguished University Professor of Global Affairs and Director of the Center for Global Economic and Environmental Opportunity at the University of Central Florida. He was a founding judge and was twice the Chairman – the chief judge – of the highest court of world trade, the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a former Member of the Congress of the United States, from Florida, and also a former international trade negotiator for the United States. He is a Global Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada and an Adjunct Scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He is the Pao Yue – Kong Chair Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. He served on the High-Level Advisory Panel to the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, chairs the global Commission on Trade and Investment Policy of the International Chamber of Commerce, and chaired the global sustainability council of the World Economic Forum. For more than fourteen years, he chaired the global practice of the largest law firm in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Professor Bacchus is the author of the books Trade and Freedom, published by Cameron May in London in 2004, and The Willing World: Shaping and Sharing a Sustainable Global Prosperity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The Financial Times named The Willing World one of the “Best Books of 2018.” He is a frequent writer in leading publications and a frequent speaker on prominent platforms worldwide on numerous topics relating to international law and international political economy.
Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law
Professor Baker teaches disability discrimination law, negotiations and a new course on human rights, intellectual property, and access to medicines. He taught and consulted in South African law schools and law school clinics between 1997-2012. Professor Baker is an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa.
Professor Baker is also a senior policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and is actively engaged in campaigns for universal access to treatment, prevention, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially expanded and improved medical treatment. More recently he has been working on accelerating research on and equitable global access to vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has written and consulted extensively on intellectual property rights, trade, investor-state dispute settlement, access to medicines, and medicines regulatory policy, including with the African Union, NEPAD, South Africa, Uganda, ASEAN, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, CARICOM, UK DfID, the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Goals Project, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Open Society Institute, UNAIDS, UNDP, Unitaid, the Medicines Patent Pool, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and others. He has served as a key, alternative board member and board member of the NGO delegation to Unitaid, which acts to improve market dynamics and early market entry of medicines and diagnostics needed to address HIV/AIDS, TB, Hepatitis C and malaria. He presently is a civil society representative to the Therapeutics Pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Acclerator.
Professor Baker also works on policy issues concerning the Global Fund and the US PEPFAR Program, and how those priority disease initiatives might contribute more broadly to improving health care delivery in developing countries. Finally, he analyzes resource needs for global health, innovative financing mechanisms and IMF macroeconomic policies that restrict increased government and donor spending on health and education in developing countries.
James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law & Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law
Jorge L. Contreras is a Distinguished University Professor, the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. He teaches and researches in the areas of intellectual property, property law, technical standardization, antitrust and science policy. In 2020 he received the University of Utah's Distinguished Research Award and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has testified before the U.S. Senate and House Subcommittees on Intellectual Property, and was awarded the Rossman Memorial Award by the Patent & Trademark Office Society in 2022.
Professor Contreras has written or edited fourteen books and published more than 150 scholarly articles and chapters. His book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (NY: Hachette/Algonquin, 2021), has been praised by the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, Nature and numerous other outlets, and was named "Best Patent Law Book of the Year" by the international IPKat blog. His scholarly articles have appeared in leading scientific, legal and policy journals including Science, Nature, NYU Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Iowa Law Review and Antitrust Law Journal. He has been quoted by media outlets around the world including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Korea Times and has been featured on C-SPAN, NPR, PRI and BBC shows and a range of podcasts and online news programs.
Professor Contreras currently serves Co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary Division of the ABA's Section of Science & Technology Law and a member of the Advisory Board of the American Antitrust Institute. He has previously served as Co-Chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Council of Councils, the Advisory Council of NIH's National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS), the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and the Intellectual Property Rights Policy Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). In 2021 he served as Chair of the Art Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and currently serves as Chair of the AALS Remedies Section.
Professor Contreras has previously taught at American University Washington College of Law and Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to entering academia he was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where he practiced transactional and intellectual property law in Boston, London and Washington DC. He is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (JD) and Rice University (BA, BSEE) and clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Philips of the Texas Supreme Court.
Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University School of Law
Rutschman has published and presented widely on topics related to health law, food and drug regulation, intellectual property, innovation in the life sciences, and law and technology. Recent presentations have covered topics related to vaccines and other biotechnologies, healthcare blockchain, e-health and artificial intelligence in medicine. Her legal scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in UCLA Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Arizona Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Michigan Law Review Online, Annals of Health Law and Duke Law and Technology Review, among others. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, the American Journal of Infection Control and Emerging Infectious Diseases. Her commentary pieces have been published by The Huffington Post and The Conversation and reprinted in Scientific American, Newsweek Japan and newspapers around the U.S., including the Chicago Tribune. Her ongoing book, Vaccines as Technology: Innovation, Barriers and the Public Interest, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
CoFounder, RightsClick
Steven’s extensive background in IP law and policy began as an attorney for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, after which, he served as senior counsel for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office and then as Chief Intellectual Property Counsel for the Global Intellectual Property Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Before co-founding RightsClick, he started the IP consultancy Sentinel Worldwide, and teaches copyright law at George Washington University Law School.
Director, Asia & Latin American Program, Inter-American Dialogue
Margaret Myers is director of the Asia & Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, adjunct researcher with the Núcleo Milenio sobre los Impactos de China en América Latina (ICLAC), and a senior advisor to the United States Institute of Peace. She established the Dialogue’s China and Latin America Working Group in 2011 to examine China’s growing presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Myers also developed the China-Latin America Finance Database, the first publicly available source of empirical data on Chinese state lending in Latin America, in cooperation with Global China Initiative at Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
In addition to maintaining the Dialogue’s China and Latin America and 美洲对话 blogs, Myers has published numerous articles on Chinese leadership dynamics, international capital flows, Chinese agricultural policy, and Asia-Latin America relations, among other topics. The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations and The Changing Currents of Trans-Pacific Integration: China, the TPP, and Beyond, her co-edited volumes with Dr. Carol Wise and Dr. Adrian Hearn, respectively, were published in 2016. Myers has testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Senate Finance and Foreign Relations Committees, and the US-China Security and Economic Commission on the China-Latin America relationship. She is also regularly featured in major domestic and international media, including the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, El Comercio, El País, Folha de São Paulo, CNN en Español, and BBC. In 2018, she was identified by Global Americans as part of the “new generation of public intellectuals.”
Before arriving at the Dialogue, Myers worked as a Latin America analyst and China analyst for the US Department of Defense, during which time she was deployed with the US Navy in support of Partnership of the Americas. Myers has also worked as a senior China analyst for Science Applications International Corporation; a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank; a faculty member at Georgetown University, the George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS; a mentor for the Indian Foreign Policy Research Institute’s School of Foreign Policy; and for Fauquier County Schools, where she developed the county’s first Mandarin language program. Myers received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and conducted her graduate work at The George Washington University, Zhejiang University of Technology, and the Johns Hopkins University/Nanjing University Center for Chinese-American Studies. Myers was a Council on Foreign Relations term member. She was also the recipient of a Freeman fellowship for China studies, a Fulbright Specialist grant to research China-Colombia relations in Bogotá, and a Woodrow Wilson Center fellowship to write a forthcoming book on China-Latin America relations.
Judicial Law Clerk, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida
Nitin is a recent graduate of Cornell Law School. Before his time in Ithaca, he majored in International Studies and Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and focused on power competition in South Asia during his graduate studies at the University of Oxford.
Senior Fellow, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Mihaela Papa is a Senior Fellow at the Fletcher School, where she has co-founded and led the Rising Power Alliances project and served as faculty in sustainable development and global governance.
Papa is an expert in negotiation strategy and coalition building, with a focus on BRICS and the transition to sustainability. She started her BRICS research as postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Law School and a visiting scholar at Fudan University's Center for BRICS Studies. Her recent publications analyze BRICS convergence and BRICS-US relations (EJIR, 2023), whether BRICS can de-dollarize global finance (CUP 2022 and ISA-West award), and BRICS resilience (Global Policy 2021). Her publications on environmental foreign policy, climate diplomacy, and global governance appeared in Global Environmental Politics, Global Environmental Change, Climate Policy, and other journals. Her commentary was featured in Foreign Affairs and The Conversation, as well as on CNN, Bloomberg, BBC, AP, News24, the South China Morning Post, and other media outlets.
Papa is also an active practitioner with a proven track record advising institutions on global strategies and leading international collaborations and programs, including at MIT and the Croatian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She served as a consultant for the U.S. government, the European Commission, and the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Originally a trade economist with a BA from Croatia, she completed her MA in Law and Diplomacy and PhD in International Relations at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.
Partner, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP
Andrei Iancu is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and one of the leading voices in intellectual property law and innovation policy. He is a former Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a position to which he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Andrei has decades of experience representing plaintiffs and defendants in IP matters across the technical and scientific spectra, including medical devices, genetic testing, therapeutics, the Internet, telephony, TV broadcasting, video game systems and computer peripherals. He represents clients in litigation and trials before the district courts, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the USPTO, the Federal Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court, and also counsels clients on obtaining, licensing, enforcing and defending against IP rights globally.
Partner, Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP
David J. Kappos is a partner at Cravath. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost leaders in the field of intellectual property, including intellectual property management and strategy, the development of global intellectual property norms, laws and practices as well as commercialization and enforcement of innovation-based assets. Mr. Kappos supports the Firm’s clients with a wide range of their most complex intellectual property issues, including those pertaining to blockchain and financial technology (FinTech).
From August 2009 to January 2013, Mr. Kappos served as Under Secretary of Commerce and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that role, he advised the President, the Secretary of Commerce and the Administration on intellectual property policy matters. As Director of the USPTO, he led the Agency in dramatically re-engineering its entire management and operational systems as well as its engagement with the global innovation community. He was instrumental in achieving the greatest legislative reform of the U.S. patent system in generations through passage and implementation of the Leahy‑Smith America Invents Act, signed into law by President Obama in September 2011.
Prior to leading the USPTO, Mr. Kappos held several executive posts in the legal department of IBM, the world’s largest patent holder. From 2003 to 2009, he served as the company’s chief intellectual property lawyer. In that capacity, he managed global intellectual property activities for IBM, including all aspects of patent, trademark, copyright and trade secret protection. Mr. Kappos joined IBM as a development engineer. During his more than 25 years at IBM, he served in a variety of roles including litigation counsel and Asia Pacific IP counsel, based in Tokyo, Japan, where he led all aspects of intellectual property protection, including licensing, transactions support and mergers and acquisitions activity for the Asia/Pacific region.
Mr. Kappos has received numerous accolades for his contributions to the field of intellectual property, including, among others, the 2014 Global Agenda Council Vision Award for the Intellectual Property Council’s pro bono initiative from the World Economic Forum, the 2014 Jefferson Medal from the New Jersey Intellectual Property Law Association (NJIPLA), the 2013 Board of Director’s Excellence Award from the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), the 2013 Champion of Intellectual Property Award from the District of Columbia Bar Association and the 2013 North America Government Leadership Award from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI). He was named one of the “Top 25 Icons of IP” by Law360, one of the “50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property” and the “Outstanding Practitioner of the Year in IP Transactions” by Managing IP, one of the “Top 50 Intellectual Property Trailblazers & Pioneers” and one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America” by The National Law Journal, “Intellectual Property Professional of the Year” by the Intellectual Property Owners Association and inducted into the Intellectual Property Hall of Fame by Intellectual Asset Management Magazine in 2012. Mr. Kappos was also recognized as a leading lawyer by IAM Strategy 300, IAM Patent 1000, World IP Review, The Legal 500 US, Who’s Who Legal: Patents, Lawdragon, Super Lawyers and The Best Lawyers in America. He is a frequent speaker and has authored many published articles on various intellectual property, innovation and leadership topics.
Mr. Kappos serves on the Boards of Directors of the Partnership for Public Service, the Center for Global Enterprise and the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation. He is the Chair of the Advisory Council of the Naples Roundtable, and the U.S. Chair of the U.S.-China IP Cooperation Dialogue. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, where he teaches copyright litigation, and Cornell Law School, where he teaches legal advising for the start-up general counsel.
Mr. Kappos was born in Palos Verdes, California. He received a B.S. summa cum laude in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1983 and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1990.
Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law
Arti Rai, Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law and co-Director, Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy, is an internationally recognized expert in intellectual property (IP) law, administrative law, and health policy. Rai has also taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania law schools. Rai's research on IP law and policy in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and software has been funded by NIH, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has published over 50 articles, essays, and book chapters on IP law, administrative law, and health policy. Her publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Columbia, Georgetown, and Northwestern law reviews. She is the editor of Intellectual Property Law and Biotechnology: Critical Concepts (Edward Elgar, 2011) and the co-author of a 2012 Kauffman Foundation monograph on cost-effective health care innovation.
From 2009-2010, Rai served as the Administrator of the Office of External Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As External Affairs Administrator, Rai led policy analysis of the patent reform legislation that ultimately became the America Invents Act and worked to establish the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist. Prior to that time, she had served on President-Elect Obama’s transition team reviewing the USPTO. Prior to entering academia, Rai clerked for the Honorable Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California; was a litigation associate at Jenner & Block (doing patent litigation as well as other litigation); and was a litigator at the Federal Programs Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.
Rai regularly testifies before Congress and relevant administrative bodies on IP law and policy issues and regularly advises federal agencies on IP policy issues raised by the research that they fund. She is a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research and of an Expert Advisory Council to the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA). Rai is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the American Law Institute, and co-chair of the IP Committee of the Administrative Law Section of the ABA. Rai is currently a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Strategies for Responsible Sharing of Clinical Trial Data and has served on, or as a reviewer for, numerous National Academies of Science committees. In 2011, Rai won the World Technology Network Award for Law.
Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a degree in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991. Rai's moot court team at Harvard Law School won Best Brief and Team honors at the school's prestigious Ames Moot Court Competition.
Professor of Law and Director, Intellectual Property and Information Law Program, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
Saurabh Vishnubhakat is a Professor of Law and Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Law Program at Cardozo Law. He is also a Research Fellow at the Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy and a Senior Scholar at the George Mason University Center for IP and Innovation Policy. Previously, he held joint appointments as a Professor of Law and Professor of Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Professor Vishnubhakat’s expertise is in intellectual property, administrative law and federal litigation, especially from an empirical perspective. His legal writings have been cited in federal judicial opinions, agency regulations and over two dozen Supreme Court briefs. His latest work is published or forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal, the Washington and Lee Law Review and the Iowa Law Review as well as the peer-reviewed Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA and the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
His research explores the interaction of the U.S. intellectual property system with federal courts and agencies, among other topics. With a background in the natural sciences, Professor Vishnubhakat brings a scientific mindset to legal thinking and is dedicated to teaching students how to build arguments with analytical rigor.
Prior to his appointment at Texas A&M, Professor Vishnubhakat served in the United States Patent and Trademark Office as principal legal advisor to that agency’s first two chief economists. He was also a faculty fellow at Duke Law School, where he co-taught patent law and was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke Center for Public Genomics, where he researched law and policy issues surrounding innovation in genetics and biomedicine.
Professor Vishnubhakat holds both a J.D. and LL.M. in intellectual property from the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law, where he was an editor of the Law Review. He also holds a B.S. in chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is admitted to the bars of Texas, Illinois, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Distinguished University Professor of Global Affairs and Director, Center for Global Economic and Environmental Opportunity, University of Central Florida
James Bacchus is the Distinguished University Professor of Global Affairs and Director of the Center for Global Economic and Environmental Opportunity at the University of Central Florida. He was a founding judge and was twice the Chairman – the chief judge – of the highest court of world trade, the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a former Member of the Congress of the United States, from Florida, and also a former international trade negotiator for the United States. He is a Global Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada and an Adjunct Scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He is the Pao Yue – Kong Chair Professor at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. He served on the High-Level Advisory Panel to the Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, chairs the global Commission on Trade and Investment Policy of the International Chamber of Commerce, and chaired the global sustainability council of the World Economic Forum. For more than fourteen years, he chaired the global practice of the largest law firm in the United States and one of the largest in the world. Professor Bacchus is the author of the books Trade and Freedom, published by Cameron May in London in 2004, and The Willing World: Shaping and Sharing a Sustainable Global Prosperity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The Financial Times named The Willing World one of the “Best Books of 2018.” He is a frequent writer in leading publications and a frequent speaker on prominent platforms worldwide on numerous topics relating to international law and international political economy.
Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law
Professor Baker teaches disability discrimination law, negotiations and a new course on human rights, intellectual property, and access to medicines. He taught and consulted in South African law schools and law school clinics between 1997-2012. Professor Baker is an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa.
Professor Baker is also a senior policy analyst for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and is actively engaged in campaigns for universal access to treatment, prevention, and care for people living with HIV/AIDS, especially expanded and improved medical treatment. More recently he has been working on accelerating research on and equitable global access to vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has written and consulted extensively on intellectual property rights, trade, investor-state dispute settlement, access to medicines, and medicines regulatory policy, including with the African Union, NEPAD, South Africa, Uganda, ASEAN, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Venezuela, CARICOM, UK DfID, the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Goals Project, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Open Society Institute, UNAIDS, UNDP, Unitaid, the Medicines Patent Pool, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and others. He has served as a key, alternative board member and board member of the NGO delegation to Unitaid, which acts to improve market dynamics and early market entry of medicines and diagnostics needed to address HIV/AIDS, TB, Hepatitis C and malaria. He presently is a civil society representative to the Therapeutics Pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Acclerator.
Professor Baker also works on policy issues concerning the Global Fund and the US PEPFAR Program, and how those priority disease initiatives might contribute more broadly to improving health care delivery in developing countries. Finally, he analyzes resource needs for global health, innovative financing mechanisms and IMF macroeconomic policies that restrict increased government and donor spending on health and education in developing countries.
James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law & Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law
Jorge L. Contreras is a Distinguished University Professor, the James T. Jensen Endowed Professor for Transactional Law and Director of the Program on Intellectual Property and Technology Law. He teaches and researches in the areas of intellectual property, property law, technical standardization, antitrust and science policy. In 2020 he received the University of Utah's Distinguished Research Award and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has testified before the U.S. Senate and House Subcommittees on Intellectual Property, and was awarded the Rossman Memorial Award by the Patent & Trademark Office Society in 2022.
Professor Contreras has written or edited fourteen books and published more than 150 scholarly articles and chapters. His book, The Genome Defense: Inside the Epic Legal Battle to Determine Who Owns Your DNA (NY: Hachette/Algonquin, 2021), has been praised by the NY Times, Wall St. Journal, Nature and numerous other outlets, and was named "Best Patent Law Book of the Year" by the international IPKat blog. His scholarly articles have appeared in leading scientific, legal and policy journals including Science, Nature, NYU Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Iowa Law Review and Antitrust Law Journal. He has been quoted by media outlets around the world including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Korea Times and has been featured on C-SPAN, NPR, PRI and BBC shows and a range of podcasts and online news programs.
Professor Contreras currently serves Co-Chair of the Interdisciplinary Division of the ABA's Section of Science & Technology Law and a member of the Advisory Board of the American Antitrust Institute. He has previously served as Co-Chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Council of Councils, the Advisory Council of NIH's National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS), the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and the Intellectual Property Rights Policy Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). In 2021 he served as Chair of the Art Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) and currently serves as Chair of the AALS Remedies Section.
Professor Contreras has previously taught at American University Washington College of Law and Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to entering academia he was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where he practiced transactional and intellectual property law in Boston, London and Washington DC. He is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (JD) and Rice University (BA, BSEE) and clerked for Chief Justice Thomas R. Philips of the Texas Supreme Court.
Assistant Professor, Saint Louis University School of Law
Rutschman has published and presented widely on topics related to health law, food and drug regulation, intellectual property, innovation in the life sciences, and law and technology. Recent presentations have covered topics related to vaccines and other biotechnologies, healthcare blockchain, e-health and artificial intelligence in medicine. Her legal scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in UCLA Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Arizona Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Michigan Law Review Online, Annals of Health Law and Duke Law and Technology Review, among others. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, the American Journal of Infection Control and Emerging Infectious Diseases. Her commentary pieces have been published by The Huffington Post and The Conversation and reprinted in Scientific American, Newsweek Japan and newspapers around the U.S., including the Chicago Tribune. Her ongoing book, Vaccines as Technology: Innovation, Barriers and the Public Interest, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
CoFounder, RightsClick
Steven’s extensive background in IP law and policy began as an attorney for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, after which, he served as senior counsel for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office and then as Chief Intellectual Property Counsel for the Global Intellectual Property Center of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Before co-founding RightsClick, he started the IP consultancy Sentinel Worldwide, and teaches copyright law at George Washington University Law School.
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