Arthur Daemmrich is director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution. His research explores the history of science and technology and innovative business sectors. Daemmrich has published in science and technology studies, history of science, technology and medicine, and health and business policy. Before joining the Smithsonian in 2015, he was an associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a visiting professor at the China Europe International Business School. Among his research interests and projects: the history of science, technology, and medicine; risk and regulation; environmental history; healthcare systems, healthcare policy, invention, employment, and industrial revolutions.

Brian Hinman is Chief Innovation Officer at Aon IP Solutions, a risk management provider. A seasoned IP executive, Brian has over 27 years experience managing all aspects of intellectual property for some of the world's largest companies. Most recently he served as Chief IP Officer of Royal Philips and CEO of Philips Intellectual Property and Standards. Prior to that, he was co-founder of Unified Patents Inc., and before that he was Vice President of Licensing for InterDigital. Brian has served as Vice President of IP and Licensing for Verizon, the founding CEO of Allied Security Trust, and also served as Vice President of IP and Licensing for IBM. He has been a board member of the Center for IP Understanding since 2017. Brian is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Bruce Beman is Managing Director of Brody Berman Associates, a management consulting and communications firm that serves innovative businesses. Brody Berman has supported more than 200 IP-centric businesses and portfolios since 1988, as well as many law firms and their clients. In 2016, he founded CIPU, which serves as chairman. Bruce is responsible for five books about the business of IP, including From Ideas to Assets. His articles have appeared in Nature Biotechnology, National Law Review and The New York Times. His Intangible Investor column currently appears on IP Watchdog; 97 of these articles appeared in IAM magazine between 2003 and 2019. IP CloseUp, a weekly update on trends that he publishes, is read in more than 60 countries and has been visited more than 280,000 times. Bruce holds a Masters’ Degree film scholarship from Columbia University, where he taught for four years, and completed course work and comprehensive exams for the Ph.D.

David J. Teece is the Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Dr, Teece is Director of the Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital and Berkeley’s Institute for Business Innovation. His areas of interest include corporate strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, competition policy, and intellectual property. Dr. Teece has testified in many seminal IP cases, including Napster and Apple v. Samsung, and founded with other Berkeley faculty members the Law and Economics Consulting Group (LECG). Dr. Teece has authored over 30 books and 200 scholarly papers, and is one of the most recognized economics scholars, having been cited more than 120,000 times. He has received five honorary doctorates and has been recognized by Royal Honors. Journal of International Business editor, John Cantwell, noted that Dr. Teece is perhaps the only person in the world that could qualify today as both an eminent scholar and business leader.

Efrat Kasznik is President of Foresight Valuation Group, a Silicon-Valley based IP valuation and strategy consulting firm. Ms. Kasznik also serves as a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she has been teaching MBA and executive education classes for over a decade. Ms. Kasznik has over 25 years of consulting experience, focusing on assisting IP holders across industries with the valuation, commercialization, and monetization of their intangible assets. She helps clients, ranging in size from Fortune 100 companies to start-ups, with IP and business valuations in support of licensing deals, IP and technology acquisitions, M&A transactions, financial reporting, strategic planning, and fundraising. She frequently serves as a testifying expert in disputes involving IP and startup valuations and damages. Ms. Kasznik served as Chair of the High-Tech Sector (2019-2020), and is currently serving as Chair of the Valuation Committee of LES USA-Canada. She is also a member of the Board of the LES Silicon Valley Chapter. She has been recognized as one of the top IP strategists in the world by IAM 300 for 8 years in a row (2013-2020).

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Ellington West is co-founder and CEO of Sonavi Labs, a medical device and software developer rooted in the application of artificial intelligence. As an entrepreneur, West leads Sonavi Labs, a Johns Hopkins startup which has created an intelligent stethoscope capable of discerning a range of medical conditions that is on its way to becoming a global force in respiratory diagnostics and AI-enabled medical tools. Ellington brings her experience and formidable contacts in the business and medical community of Baltimore to her role as CEO.  “I know that because I am a woman of color,” she has said, “and we occupy so few leadership roles in the Tech industry, that I am going to stand out and we plan to execute the mission of the company flawlessly.” The Sonavi team is led by women, all of whom have a significant experience in mechanical engineering, computer science, data governance and business development. Putting a strong, eclectic team together was her first priority and something she learned from her father, Dr. James E. West, a Hall of Fame inventor.

James Conley is clinical professor of technology at Northwestern University. He serves on the faculty of both the Kellogg School of Management and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. He is a faculty contributor in the Kellogg Center for Research in Technology & Innovation and serves as a Faculty Fellow at the Segal Design Institute (NU IDEA). Beyond academia, Professor Conley is an inventor, ad active advocate of IP education for business and other students, and leads seminars globally for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). He is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of Commerce Trademark Public Advisory Committee of the Patent and Trademark Office. Professor Conley’s research investigates the strategic use of intangible assets and intellectual properties to build and sustain competitive advantage. 

Dr. James West, a research professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University, is known worldwide as the co-inventor of the foil electret microphone. This is a type of condenser microphone upon which 90 percent of all microphones used today, including those used in telephones, sound and music recording equipment, and hearing aids. Dr. West developed the invention with his research partner Gerhard Sessler in 1962 while both were scientists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hills, NJ. Dr. West holds more than 60 U.S. patents and more than 200 foreign patents using polymer foil electrets in transducers during his 40-year career with Bell Laboratories, where he had worked as an acoustical scientist since graduating in 1957 from Temple University with a degree in Physics. He has also authored or contributed to more than 150 technical papers and several books on acoustics, solid-state physics and materials science.

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Dr. West has received honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania and Temple, is a member of the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame and recipient of U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Jesse Fenty is a seasoned patent attorney at H.C. Park, a DC-area IP firm, where he has also works on trademark and copyright matters. Fenty served as an examiner in the semiconductor arts for nine years at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In 2019, Fenty founded Endless IP, a non-profit that delivers instruction, lesson plans, educational services, consulting, and other programs in the Intellectual Property space serving pre-K to grade 12, college students, and professionals. Endless IP leverages the legal and engineering backgrounds of their team members to produce educational content that is essential to today's high tech professions. Endless IP supplements traditional STEM programs by providing comprehensive course content to help students understand the nuances of Intellectual Property Law and how it affects their lives. Fenty is Programs Chair for the Intellectual Property Group of the National Society of Black Engineers. In this role he develops courses and lectures to be presented at local, regional, and national NSBE conferences. 

Jeremie O. Waterman is president of the China Center and vice president for Greater China at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  Waterman is responsible for developing and executing Chamber policy initiatives in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mongolia as well as steering the Chamber’s policy work in the Asia-Pacific region. In carrying out the Chamber’s Greater China agenda, Waterman directs its trade and investment policy advocacy and initiatives in the areas of investment, innovation, intellectual property rights, financial services, agriculture, health care, energy and environment, and corporate governance and social responsibility.

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Waterman has pioneered a number of Chamber business initiatives focused on China, such as the U.S.-China CEO Dialogue and the newly created China Center. Before joining the Chamber, Waterman worked for five years at the US-China Business Council as director for government affairs. He also served at the Office of the United States Trade Representative in the offices of Congressional Affairs and Africa.

John E. Kelly III is a recently retired Executive Vice President at IBM, responsible for guiding IBM's global technical and business, overseeing IBM's enterprise wide Intellectual Property, Security and Privacy, academic, industrial, and government partnerships, as well as its technical community. He was also responsible for leading the company's Watson Health unit. During this tenure, Dr. Kelly played numerous significant technical and business roles driving IBM's leadership in technologies ranging from semiconductors to supercomputers to Artificial Intelligence (AI) cognitive systems. Previously, Dr. Kelly served as senior vice president, Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research, where he oversaw IBM's (AI) Watson platform, portfolio and investments.  Under his leadership, IBM expanded the specialization of IBM Watson into various industries and domains including health, security, analytics, Internet of Things (IOT), and financial services. He was also responsible for IBM Research and the company’s Intellectual Property.

Dr. Kelly served as senior vice president and director of IBM Research - only the tenth person to hold that position over the past seven decades. Under Dr. Kelly, IBM Research expanded its global footprint by adding four new labs (including IBM’s first in Africa, South America and Australia), creating a network of approximately 3,000 scientists and technical employees across 12 laboratories in 10 countries.  Most notably, Dr. Kelly and his team were responsible for advancing the science of AI and cognitive computing through his support for Watson, the groundbreaking system that defeated two standing Jeopardy! world champions in 2011. This demonstration awoke the world to the potential of AI.

Jon Putnam founded Competition Dynamics as a platform for economic research and testimony at the intersection of intellectual property, competition, and international trade law. He holds BA, MA and PhD degrees in economics from Yale University, where he specialized in international, macro and R&D economics. He received fellowships at Yale and Columbia Law Schools, and a Yale International and Area Studies fellowship for the study of European patent systems. Dr. Putnam’s thesis, The Value of International Patent Rights, was the first to measure the global value of patent rights. Dr. Putnam has held a professorship in the Law and Economics of Intellectual Property at the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy, University of Toronto, as well as academic appointments at the Boston University Graduate School of Management, Columbia University Schools of Law and Business, Vassar College, and Yale College.

Dr. Putnam has been retained in more than 100 consulting engagements and has testified more than 40 times in patent, antitrust, copyright, trade secret, contract and tax actions in federal, state and bankruptcy courts; before the US Federal Trade Commission, International Trade Commission, and Tax Court; and in US and international arbitrations. He regularly testifies in large-scale intellectual property litigation, including Apple v Qualcomm and Ericsson v Huawei.

Dr. Lisa D. Cook is a Professor in the Department of Economics and at James Madison College at Michigan State University. Her research suggested that violence against African-Americans under the Jim Crow laws led to a lower than expected number of actual patents filed. Her research is at the intersection of macroeconomics and economic history, with recent work in African-American history and innovation economics.  Among her current research interests are economic growth and development, financial institutions and markets, innovation, and economic history.  She is  author of  'Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940.'

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Dr. Cook was a member of the faculty at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Harvard Business School from 1997 to 2002, spending a year as a senior adviser on finance and development at the U.S. Treasury Department as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow from 2000 to 2001. She was a National Fellow and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University from 2002 to 2005, As a Senior Economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the 2011-2012 academic year, she worked on the euro zone, financial instruments, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In November 2020, Dr. Cook was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden Presidential transition Agency Review Team.

Mark Cohen heads the Asia IP Project at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law School.  Previously, Mark was Senior Counsel, China in the Office of Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, after serving as a visiting professor at Fordham Law School (2011-2012). Prior to that time, he served in such functions as: Director, International Intellectual Property at Microsoft Corporation; Of Counsel to Jones Day’s Beijing office; and Senior Intellectual Property Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (2004- 2008). Mark holds a J.D. degree from Columbia University (1984), an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Chinese Language and Literature (1979) and a B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany in Chinese Studies. He  publishes the well-regarded blog, China IPR.

Michal Mangelson is senior counsel for China IP in the USPTO’s Office of Policy and International Affairs and former IP attaché at the U.S. Consulate, Shanghai.

He joined the USPTO as Principal Counsel and Director for China IP in 2020 after serving one year as Senior Counsel for China IP and five years as the U.S. Intellectual Property Attaché in Shanghai. Michael leads a team in advocating U.S. IP interests, policies and initiatives in China and works closely with U.S. rights holders on IP protection and enforcement issues.

Mangelson has 20+ years of experience as a business IP attorney with a focus on China services. Prior to joining the Commercial Service/USPTO, Mike was a partner at Stoel Rives LLP in Salt Lake City where he assisted clients in protecting and enforcing their business IP, including trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets, and in commercializing their IP through licensing and other IP transactions. He also consulted clients on branding, counterfeiting, marketing law and long-term IP strategies to help secure and protect market positioning and competitive advantages. Mangelson studied Chinese and practiced  in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Los Angeles, and is fluent in Mandarin.

Judge Rader has been a thought-leader in the field of intellectual property law and jurisprudence for over 30 years. He served as Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (2010-2014) and has taught patent law globally to students, judges and government officials. He is a member of the law faculty at Tsinghua University and has conducted full-credit courses at leading law schools in Washington, D.C., Seattle, Santa Clara, Bangkok, Seoul, Tokyo, Munich.

Judge Rader was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 and assumed the duties of Chief Judge on June 1, 2010. He was appointed to the United States Claims Court (now the U. S. Court of Federal Claims) by President Ronald W. Reagan in 1988. Before appointment to the Court of Federal Claims, former Chief Judge Rader served as Minority and Majority Chief Counsel to Subcommittees of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Since leaving the bench in 2014, Judge Rader has founded the Rader Group, initially focusing on arbitration, mediation and legal consulting, as well as legal education services. He has consulted with major corporations and law firms on IP policy and litigation and advised foreign governments on international IP standards. He continues to advocate improvements in innovation policy.

Dr. Stephanie Couch is the Executive Director of the Lemelson-MIT Program which is part of the School of Engineering within MIT. In this role, she oversees two national prize programs that make annual awards to mid-career inventors and college students, including the prestigious Lemelson-MIT prize. She directs a number of national invention education initiatives aimed at helping young people develop as inventors. Her research during the past three years has focused on ways young people learn to think and work as inventors, and on the teachers and other adults who facilitate students’ development. Prior to joining the Lemelson-MIT Program, Dr. Couch worked in California in numerous roles focused on K-12 and higher education policy issues in school finance and technology in teaching and learning. She is recognized for her strengths in developing multi-stakeholder partnerships and facilitating collaborative efforts that advance invention education and STEM learning opportunities for students, with an emphasis on students underrepresented in STEM college/career pathways.

Steven Weiner has three decades of experience advising companies and stakeholders on strategic decisions that require a deep understanding of intellectual property, advanced technology and business strategy.  He currently serves as Senior Director of Innovation & Technology for Penn Engineering, and teaches IP Strategy in the Wharton School.  Steven was previously a partner with Davis Polk, leading the firm’s Corporate Intellectual Property practice.  He also served as a senior IP executive with SRI International, an independent nonprofit research institution.  Steven is a United States patent attorney, and holds a law degree from Harvard Law School, a masters in computer science from MIT, and a BSE in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Senator Thom Tillis is the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Intellectual Property, which he previously served as chair with Senator Chris Coons. He also sits on subcommittees for Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights. The Intellectual Property Committee jurisdiction includes the United States Patent and Trademark Office; the United States Copyright Office; Oversight of the functions of the federal government as they relate to intellectual property; Patents; Copyrights; Trademarks; and Trade Secrets.

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Senator Tillis is well acquainted with technology and commerce, having served as top-level executive at PricewaterhouseCoopers and IBM. His 29-year private sector career in technology and management consulting provided him with a deep understanding of policy-making and the management of complex organizations. As Chair of the Senate IP Subcommittee in the 116th Congress, Senator Tillis held 140 stakeholder meetings and 17 Senate hearings on IP topics, and introduced draft legislative text on reforms to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. His subcommittee held three hearings in 2019 on the state of patent eligibility and heard from an unprecedented forty-five diverse witnesses. Senator Tillis was elected as U.S. Senator to North Carolina in 2014.

Zeeger Vink is IP director at MF Brands Group, the Swiss company that owns several fashion and lifestyle brands, including Lacoste. Vink, is a proponent of ‘IP Consciousness,’ creating a corporate culture that is conducive to intellectual property creation and monetization. He has worked in private practice in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, focusing on intellectual property and corporate law. Subsequently, he worked as in-house IP counsel at L’Oreal, where he was in charge of global intellectual property for several group brands, before joining Lacoste as IP counsel for the Asia-Pacific region.
 

Vink holds a master’s degree in law from the University of Amsterdam, with specializations in IP law and marketing. He has taught intellectual property for the master’s program of Sciences Po’s School of Management and Innovation in Paris and currently serves as vice president of INTA. He speaks and writes regularly on topics of corporate IP management and is the author of the book The Great Catapult; How Integrated IP Management Will Shoot Your Brand to Success.