Colleen Chien is an Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University and is nationally known for her research and publications surrounding domestic and international patent law and policy issues. She has testified before Congress, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and the US Patent and Trademark Office on patent issues, and serves as a consultant to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. From 2013-2016 she served as White House Senior Advisor, Intellectual Property and Innovation, working on a broad range of patent, copyright, technology transfer, open innovation, educational innovation, and other issues. She frequently lectures at national law conferences and has published several in-depth empirical studies of the patent system, including patent-assertion entities (PAEs), patent litigation, and the secondary market for patents. She is an expert on patent litigation at the International Trade Commission (ITC), a topic on which she has authored several articles and co-authors a practice guide.
Prior to joining the Santa Clara University School of Law faculty in 2007, Professor Chien prosecuted patents at Fenwick & West LLP in San Francisco, as an associate and then Special Counsel. She has been a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, and Visiting Senior Scholar at Berkeley Law’s Center for Law and Technology. She also held positions as a strategy consultant at Dean and Company, a spacecraft engineer at NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab, and an investigative journalist at the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (as a Fulbright Scholar).
In 2017, Professor Chien was awarded the Young Scholar Medal by The American Law Institute. Additionally, in 2013, she was named the inaugural Eric Yamamoto Emerging Scholar, one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property, and one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence.”
Degree(s):
J.D., Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, 2002
A.B. and B.S. in Engineering, Stanford University, 1996