Colleen chien

Colleen Chien is Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law where she teaches, mentors students, and conducts empirical research on innovation, intellectual property, and the criminal justice system. From 2013-2015 she served in the Obama White House as the Senior Advisor on Intellectual Property and Innovation, working on a broad range of patent, copyright, technology transfer, open innovation, and other issues. Professor Chien is nationally known for her research and publications on domestic and international patent law and policy issues. She has testified on multiple occasions before Congress, the DOJ, the FTC, and the US Patent and Trademark Office on patent issues, frequently lectures at national law conferences, and has published several in-depth empirical studies, including of patent litigation and patent-assertion entities (PAEs). In the realm of criminal justice, she is founder of the Paper Prisons initiative (paperprisons.org) a research initiative that which works to document and narrow the second chance gap between those eligible for and receiving second chances (through early release, records clearing and re-infranchisement).

Professor Chien’s work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, NPR’s Marketplace, and numerous other venues and she is among the top 20-cited intellectual property and cyberlaw scholars in the US. Prior to entering academia, Professor Chien did stints as an investigative journalist, strategy consultant, and practicing lawyer (as an associate, then special counsel at Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco). Professor Chien is a recipient of the American Law Institute’s Early Career Medal; the Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and the Eric Yamamoto Emerging Scholar award. She has been named a Tech Law Trailblazer (for her work founding “the Second Chances and Empathy Hackathon”), one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence,” and one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property in the world. She is the founder of several civic engagement projects, a Faculty Scholar of the Markkula Center for Ethics. Professor Chien graduated from Stanford (Engineering) and UC Berkeley Law School.