We are delighted to welcome the newest member of our faculty group, Professor Jorge Contreras. Professor Contreras joins us from American University’s Washington College of Law, where he has taught for the past three years. He specializes in intellectual property, law and science, and property law. Before entering law teaching, Professor Contreras 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.
Professor Contreras’s current research focuses, among other things, on the development of technical standards and the use and dissemination of data generated by large-scale scientific research projects. He is an internationally-recognized authority in the area of standards-essential patents and has been a leader in the development of the legal and policy aspects of genomic and biomedical research for nearly two decades. He has written and spoken extensively on the institutional and intellectual property structures of technical standardization and biomedical research, and his published work has appeared in scientific, legal and policy journals including Science, Nature Biotechnology, Jurimetrics, American University Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Antitrust Law Journal, Santa Clara Law Review and Utah Law Review (forthcoming). He recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume exploring legal issues at the intersection of biological and computational science, Bioinformatics Law: Legal Issues for Computational Biology in the Post-Genome Era (Chicago: ABA Publishing, 2013), and is a frequent speaker and commentator on these issues. He is currently at work on a book on the Myriad genetics case.
Professor Contreras currently serves Co-Chair of the Technical Standardization Committee of the ABA’s Section of Science & Technology Law, and a member of the Advisory Council of the National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS), the Cures Acceleration Network (CAN) Board of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Intellectual Property Rights Policy Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). He has recently completed a six-year term as Co-Chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, and has served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes and the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research at NIH.
We are delighted with the range and depth of expertise that Professor Contreras brings to our group.