Benjamin Jackson
Senior
Director of Legal Affairs at Myriad Genetics.
At Myriad, oversees all aspects of Myriad’s intellectual
property portfolio as well as a significant portion of Myriad’s commercial
legal matters. Specialties include US
and PCT patent prosecution; IP due dilligence; IP and other transactions;
litigation support; appellate advocacy.
Former
Patent Counsel at Myriad Genetics where he managed a sizable patent portfolio
and supported commercial operations.
JD,
2007, Brigham Young University – J. Reuben Clark Law School.
Nathan Kelley
Deputy Solicitor and Assistant General Counsel for Intellectual Property at the United States Patent and Trademark Office
Nathan Kelley is the Deputy Solicitor and Assistant General Counsel for Intellectual Property at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He manages most IP litigation involving the USPTO and has been the lead agency counsel in over twenty appeals before the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He has defended the USPTO on a wide range of legal issues, from specific patentability determinations to broader issues involving the USPTO’s statutory examination duties, the limits of its reexamination jurisdiction, and the scope of various provisions of the Hatch-Waxman Act. He also provides advice and guidance to the agency regarding various intellectual property policy issues, including ongoing legislative proposals related to the patent system generally. Mr. Kelley is also an adjunct professor at The George Washington University Law School. Before he joined the Solicitor’s Office, Mr. Kelley worked at the Federal Circuit, first as a member of its permanent legal staff, and later as a judicial law clerk to the Hon. Randall R. Rader. Earlier, he was an associate at an intellectual property law firm in Washington D.C. His career began as a patent examiner at the USPTO, where he examined patent applications directed to integrated circuits and computer chips. Mr. Kelley received both a JD magna cum laude and a BS in electrical engineering from George Mason University.
Judge Alex Kozinski
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
In 1982, Judge Kozinski was appointed chief judge at the newly formed United States Court of Federal Claims. In 1985, at the age of 35, Kozinski was appointed to a new seat at the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by President Reagan, making him the youngest federal appeals court judge at the time of appointment.
Judge Kozinski clerked for future Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Ninth Circuit from 1975 to 1976, and then for Chief Justice Warren Burger from 1976 to 1977. From June 5, 1981 to August 1982, Kozinski served as the first U.S. Special Counsel appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
JD, 1975, UCLA School of Law
AB, 1972 University of California, Los Angeles
Vern Norviel
Partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
Vern Norviel leads the patents and innovation counseling practice. Vern has more than two decades of experience in formulating successful strategies for life science companies and the development of their IP programs. He represents a wide variety of companies, as well as venture capital firms, in areas such as therapeutics, diagnostics, nanotechnology, genomics, proteomics, and personalized medicine. In fact, Vern’s interest in the field of personalized medicine prompted him to become the first attorney to have had his or her entire genome sequenced and made available in a public database.
Before joining the firm in 2003, Vern was the general counsel and corporate secretary of Perlegen Sciences, Inc., a start-up biotechnology company that scans the entire human genome for important therapeutic and diagnostic products. Previously, as senior vice president and general counsel, he was an early employee of Affymetrix, the biotechnology company that pioneered and developed DNA chip technology. He also had been a partner at Townsend and Townsend and Crew in Palo Alto.
During his career, Vern has authored or prosecuted more than 20 patents that have been litigated in the United States and abroad, and has overseen intellectual property lawsuits throughout the world.
Vern currently serves as a member of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati’s Compensation Committee and on the board of the WSGR Foundation, and previously served as a member of the Policy Committee. In addition, he is a lecturer in biotechnology law at UC Berkeley School of Law.
JD, University of San Francisco School of Law with Honors
Michael Shuster
Ph.D, Partner at Fenwick & West LLP and is co-chair of the firm’s Life Sciences Group
Dr. Shuster has legal and technical experience representing companies in biotechnology and high technology areas that include protein and nucleic acid chemistry, clean tech, high resolution protein structures, proteomics, genomics, combinatorial peptide libraries, vaccine development for viral and autoimmune disorders, transdermal drug delivery systems, liposomal drug formulations as well as microfluidics devices.
While at Columbia he worked with Professor Eric Kandel as part of a team focused on discovery of mechanisms by which short term memories are stored, work for which Professor Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000. Dr. Shuster pursued his interests in ion channel biophysics and protein structure, first as a Markey post-doctoral fellow at UCSF’s Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics, and then as a research biochemist studying neuronal mechanisms of pain transduction in UCSF’s Department of Medicine.
Currently, Dr. Shuster is a co-instructor of “A Life Scientist’s Guide to Intellectual Property” at UCSF, and regularly lectures about intellectual property law subjects. He is past chair of the Intellectual Property section of the Barrister’s Club of San Francisco. Dr. Shuster was named one of Top 25 Biotech Lawyers in California in 2011 and one of the Top 25 Intellectual Property Portfolio Managers in 2009 and 2012 by the Daily Journal. He was also recognized as a “Life Sciences Star” for his outstanding patent work in Euromoney’s LMG Life Sciences 2012.
Dr. Shuster has published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals as well as articles on biotechnology patent law. Representative technologies for which he’s written and prosecuted patent applications include genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, vaccines, microfluidic devices, drug delivery methods and microarrays.
JD, 1997, University of San Francisco School of Law cum laude
Ph.D., 1986, The Department of Physiology and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University