Panelist Bios

Keynote Speaker

Jerry Thursby

Jerry G. Thursby received his A.B. (1969) and Ph.D. (1975) in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics, Emory University. Prior appointments have been at Syracuse University (1975-78), Ohio State University (1978-88) and Purdue University (1988-2001). Professor Thursby has received several teaching awards and he has published extensively in the areas of econometrics, international trade, and the licensing of university technologies. His current research interests include multinational R&D site location decisions and the patent activity of university faculty. He has received research funding from the Alan and Mildred Peterson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and National Bureau of Economic Research through the NBER Project on Industrial Technology and Productivity, The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He currently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Technology Transfer and is an associate editor of The Journal of Productivity Analysis. He has published extensively in such journals as Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Economic Review, Journal of Econometrics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Science and Research Policy.  

Panelists

Marianne Underweiser

Marian Underweiser is Intellectual Property Counsel for IBM Corporation. She is responsible for all aspects of IP legal support for IBM’s corporate business functions. Ms. Underweiser is also a founding member of IBM’s IP legal strategy and policy committee. In this latter role she has led in formulating, expressing and executing IBM’s public policy on a broad spectrum of IP matters. Her recent work in this area includes authorship of IBM’s amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court case of eBay v. Mercexchange, formulation and deployment of the patent quality projects undertaken by the USPTO and Open Source Software Communities, as well as development of numerous proposals for legislative reform of IP laws in the US and abroad. Within IBM Ms. Underweiser has played a pivotal role in managing the IBM legal department’s transition from a proprietary product-based business to one focused on services, open-source and open standards, lecturing based on the numerous internal position papers she has authored on these subjects. Previously, Ms. Underweiser served as a member of IBM’s IP licensing function where she led IP negotiations for many of IBM’s major transactions including divestitures and high profile patent and technology licensing matters. Prior to joining IBM, Ms. Underweiser was a litigation associate at Kenyon & Kenyon.

Ms. Underweiser is a graduate of Harvard University where she received her AB in Physics in 1983. She received her PhD in Physics from UCLA in 1992, and her JD from Columbia Law School in 1997. She is admitted to practice law in New York, and is registered to practice before the US Patent & Trademark Office.

Dan Ravicher

Mr. Ravicher is Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), a not-for-profit legal services organization that represents the public's interests in the patent system, and most particularly the public's interests against the harms caused by wrongly issued patents and unsound patent policy; Legal Director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a not-for-profit legal services organization that provides pro-bono legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software, and a registered patent attorney. Prior to founding PUBPAT and co-founding SFLC with Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia Law School, Mr. Ravicher was associated with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, LLP, and Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, LLP, all in New York, and served the Honorable Randall R. Rader, Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.. Mr. Ravicher received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was the Franklin O. Blechman Scholar for his class, a Mortimer Caplin Public Service Award recipient and Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, and his bachelors degree in materials science magna cum laude with University Honors from the University of South Florida. Mr. Ravicher has published numerous legal articles and given dozens of presentations regarding both Free and Open Source Software legal issues and patent law and is an Adjunct Professor of Patent Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Diane Peters

Diane, OSDL's first general counsel, has advised the non profit organization for more than 4 years. She is responsible for all of the organization’s global legal operations and affairs, including overseeing the Patent Commons Project and working with the U.S. Patent Office on patent quality reform with specific emphasis on the Open Source as Prior Art Initiative (developer.osdl.org/dev/priorart/). Prior to joining OSDL, Diane practiced law at Ater Wynne LLP in Portland. Before joining Ater Wynne, she worked with firms in Buenos Aires, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. In her private practice, Diane advised trade associations and other tax-exempt organizations on nonprofit, corporate, and anti-trust issues and counseled clients on software licensing issues. She also worked closely with emerging growth technology companies on corporate finance and intellectual property matters.

Diane holds a number of board and advisory board positions, including board director for Software Freedom Law Center. She earned a B.A. in political science from Grinnell College in 1986, and a J.D. from Washington University School of Law in 1989, where she served as an executive editor of the Washington University Law Quarterly.

Luis Villa

Luis is currently the 'senior geek in residence' at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, working on a variety of software projects, including the h2o project and internal tools. Prior to that, he was at Ximian and Novell, working on Linux-based desktop projects with global teams of hackers. His projects included the Evolution PIM, the GNOME 2.0 release (in collaboration with Sun), and the Ximian and Novell Linux Desktops. Outside of the Berkman Center, Luis remains involved in Free Software, serving on the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors and the Fedora Project's Advisory Board.

Luis's undergraduate education was at Duke University, where he majored in political science and computer science (neither of which are a science, of course.) While at Duke, Luis attended over one hundred basketball games while wearing a devil mask, and co-authored Extreme Mindstorms: An Advanced Guide To Lego Mindstorms.

Anne Margulies

Anne H. Margulies is the executive director of MIT's bold OpenCourseWare initiative, and brings 20 years of leadership experience in strategic planning, information technology and operations to the MIT OCW project. She came to MIT in May 2002 from FH/GPC, a government relations, public affairs, and communications consulting firm where she was the Chief Operating Officer responsible for the overall performance of the firm. Prior to her time at FH/GPC, Anne was the executive vice-president of McDermott O'Neill & Associates, where she restructured the senior management team and planned and managed the sale of the company to GPC International. From 1986 to 1998, Anne held information technology positions at Harvard University, serving as assistant provost and executive director for Harvard's Information Systems department with responsibility for all centralized administrative IT activities.

Carlos Carbajal

Intel Corp. Higher Education Programs Manager

Allan Ryan Jr.

Allan A. Ryan, Jr. has been Director of Intellectual Property at Harvard Business School Publishing since the creation of the position in February 2001. Before then, he was for 15 years an attorney in the Office of General Counsel, Harvard University, where his practice concentrated on intellectual property, art and cultural matters, and international law.

Harvard Business School Publishing, a subsidiary of the Harvard Business School, publishes Harvard Business Review and the books of the Harvard Business School Press, as well as Harvard Business School Cases, several newsletters and a variety of electronic endeavors for academia and the corporate sector.

As Director of Intellectual Property, Mr. Ryan is responsible for the acquisition, licensing and protection of HBSP’s content. This includes such matters as authors’ contracts, international publication and distribution of HBSP content, and protection against piracy, counterfeiting and copyright infringement. Mr. Ryan also oversees HBSP’s trademark and patent activities, and was chair of the company’s China working group. He has spoken at professional conferences on foreign-invested publishing enterprises in China.

Mr. Ryan teaches courses in international law at Boston College Law School and in intellectual property at Harvard University summer school. Before coming to Harvard in 1985, he was a supervising prosecutor in the United States Department of Justice, an assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, and a law clerk to Justice Byron R. White of the United States Supreme Court. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota Law School, and served as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Michael Carroll

Professor Carroll received his A.B., with general honors, from the University of Chicago and his J.D. magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center. He also was elected to the Order of the Coif. While in law school, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Criminal Law Review. Following law school, he worked for approximately one year as an associate attorney at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C. and then clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green. He later clerked for D.C. Circuit Judge Judith W. Rogers. He returned to Wilmer after completing that clerkship. At Wilmer, he practiced in the intellectual property and e-commerce areas. He also has co-taught a copyright class at Georgetown University Law Center. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Creative Commons, Inc., www.creativecommons.org.

Joanne Scott

Joanne Scott is a Professor of European Law and Director of the Centre for Law and Governance at the University College London, Europe. She is a regular visiting professor at Columbia Law School, and is visiting this year at Harvard Law School. She is currently working on issues surrounding the regulation of food safety in a global context, and on new approaches to governance in the European Union. Her recent publications include a co-edited volume on “Law and new governance in the EU and US,” Hart Publishing (2006); “International Trade and Environmental Governance: Relating Rules (and Standards) in the EU and the WTO,” 15 European Journal of International Law 307 (2004), and “Mind the Gap: Law and New Approaches to Governance in the European Union,” with David Trubek European Law Journal 1 (2002).

Sheila Jasanoff

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University . She has held academic positions at Cornell, Yale, Oxford, and Kyoto. At Cornell, she founded and chaired the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She has also been a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge, Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio study center. Her research concerns the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and public policy of modern democracies, with a particular focus on the challenges of globalization. She has written and lectured widely on problems of environmental regulation, risk management, and biotechnology in the United States, Europe, and India. Her books include Controlling Chemicals (1985), The Fifth Branch (1990), Science at the Bar (1995), and Designs on Nature (2005). Jasanoff has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She holds AB, MA, JD, and PhD degrees.

Percy Schmeiser

Percy Schmeiser is a farmer and seed developer from Western Canada that was involved in a legal battle with Monsanto on farmers’ rights versus patent law. In 2000, he received the Mahatma Gandhi Award from India for the Betterment of Human Kind in a Non-Violent Way. Mr. Schmeiser is a strong advocate of designing patent law so that it protects farmers’ right to use their seeds and plants from year to year.

Ronald Riley

Ron Riley, founder of Professional Inventors Alliance USA, has produced inventions in a multitude of areas, including the telecommunications, biotechnology and consumer products industries. Specializing in industrial controls and product development, he is best known for five patents related to the automated industrial monorail and two patents on his revolutionary enhancement of the treadmill.

For more than 20 years, Riley has championed the cause of American inventors who face difficulties with the infringement of their patents. In the mid-1990’s he was a founding member and president of the advisory board of the Alliance for American Innovation. Based in Washington, DC, the organization lobbied members of Congress on behalf of independent inventors. The organization disbanded following the enactment of the American Inventors Protection Act.

As one of the most vocal critics of the Patent Reform Act of 2005, Riley argues that this new bill would irreparably damage America’s patent system and handicap U.S. inventors and entrepreneurs. The bill is sponsored by Representatives Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Howard Berman (D-CA). Riley often counsels members of Congress on national and international intellectual rights and on the protection of America’s intellectual assets.

Walter Bender

Walter Bender is President of the One Laptop per Child foundation, a not-for-profit association that is developing and deploying technologies that will revolutionize how the world's children engage in learning. Before taking his leave of absence from MIT Bender was executive director of the MIT Media Laboratory. He was also former holder of the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Chair. Bender is a senior research scientist and director of the Electronic Publishing group. Mr. Bender also directed the Gray Matters special interest group, which focuses on technology's impact on the aging population. In 1992, Mr. Bender founded the News in the Future consortium and has been a member of the Lab's Simplicity, Things That Think, and Digital Life consortia. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1977. Mr. Bender joined the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1978. He received his MS at MIT in 1980. A founding member of the Media Laboratory, throughout his career, Mr. Bender has engaged in the study of new information technologies, particularly those that affect people directly. Much of the research addresses the idea of building upon the interactive styles associated with existing media and extending them into domains where a computer is incorporated into the interaction. He has participated in much of the pioneering research in the field of electronic publishing and personalized interactive multimedia.

Rob Berman

Mr. Berman is Acacia’s Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel. Since joining the company in 2000, he has directed patent licensing and enforcement programs which have generated approximately $50 million in revenue. Prior to joining Acacia, Mr. Berman held business development and legal positions at National Media Corporation, QVC, and the law firm of Blank Rome. Mr. Berman received a B.S. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and a J. D. from Northwestern Law School.

Josh Lerner

Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and Entrepreneurial Management Units. He graduated from Yale College with a Special Divisional Major that combined physics with the history of technology. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy, at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard's Economics Department.

Much of his research focuses on the structure and role of venture capital and private equity organizations. (This research is collected in two books, The Venture Capital Cycle and The Money of Invention.) He also examines policies towards intellectual property protection, particularly patents, and how they impact firm strategies in high-technology industries. (The research is discussed in the Innovation and Its Discontents.) He founded, raised funding for, and organizes two groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy. He is a member of a number of other NBER groups and serves as co-editor of their publication, Innovation Policy and the Economy. His work has been published in a variety of top academic journals.

He serves as the School’s representative on Harvard University Patent, Trademark and Copyright Committee and on the Provost’s Committee on Technology Transfer.

Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown is Products Counsel at Google Inc. Before Google, Glenn was Executive Director of Creative Commons from 2002-2005.

Glenn graduated from Harvard Law School (JD), where he worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Harvard Law Review, and the University of Texas at Austin (BA). He served as a law clerk for the Honorable Stanley Marcus on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Miami in 2000-2001.

John Thomas

John R. Thomas is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law. Professor Thomas was formerly Associate Professor of Law at the George Washington University. He has previously joined the visiting faculties at Cornell Law School and the University of Tokyo, and also been the Congressional Research Service Visiting Scholar in Economic Growth and Entrepreneurship. Professor Thomas formerly served as law clerk to Chief Judge Helen W. Nies of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit; visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and Comparative Patent, Copyright and Unfair Competition Law in Munich, Germany; and research scholar at the Institute of Intellectual Property in Tokyo, Japan. He was previously associated with the law firm of Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, L.L.P., in Washington, D.C. Professor Thomas has published numerous articles and five books on the subject of intellectual property law.

Carl Schwelder

Carl Schwelder is a member of the Business Services Group at McDonough Holland & Allen PC. He is a patent attorney with significant expertise in biotechnology matters. Carl’s practice includes counseling clients on the preparation and prosecution of patent applications, development of patent portfolios, patent litigation, patent interference, trademark opposition, and oversight of European patents and oppositions. His patent experience includes negotiating and drafting license and research agreements; technology evaluation and assessment of third party patents relating to fermentation technologies, biomaterials and biopharmaceuticals, as well as various gene discovery technologies.

Carl previously served as general, intellectual property and patent counsel to Calgene, where he developed an extensive intellectual property portfolio relating to the company’s expression and gene discovery technologies and provided legal counsel to various Calgene subsidiaries, including produce and seed companies. Carl was most recently affiliated with Novozymes Biotech, where he supported the work of the licensing group and developed patent strategies relating to a variety of the company’s newer research efforts.