Reported by Alok Vajpeyi
Dr. Shamnad Basheer, founder of SpicyIP and former MHRD IPR Chair Professor, West Bengal National University of Judicial Sciences, is now the Honorary Research Chair Professor of the Centre for IPR, at Institute of Law, Nirma University.
He joined the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata in November 2008 as the first Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor in Intellectual Property law. Prior to this, he was the Frank H Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University law school in Washington DC.
He graduated from India’s premier law school, the National law school of India University, Bangalore. He then joined Anand and Anand, a leading intellectual property law firm in New Delhi, and worked on a variety of contentious and non-contentious IP matters before being called upon to head the firm’s Technology and Media law division. India. Whilst in practice, the IFLR 1000 guide rated him as a leading technology lawyer.
He went on to do his post-graduate studies at the University of Oxford. He completed the BCL (as a Shell Centenary scholar) and MPhil with distinction; his thesis dealing with biotechnology and patent law in India was awarded the second prize in a writing contest held by the Stanford Technology Law Review. Whilst at Oxford, he was the editor of the Oxford Commonwealth Law Journal (OUCLJ) and a founding member of EDIP (Electronic Database of Intellectual Property). He continues to be affiliated to the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Center (OIPRC), as a research associate. In the past, he has been an invited research fellow at the Institute of Intellectual Property (IIP), Tokyo, an International Bar Association (IBA) scholar and an Inter Pacific Bar Association (IPBA) scholar.
He has spoken at various international symposia on intellectual property issues and has also written extensively on IP themes in internationally reputed journals. He has also consulted on a wide variety of IP issues, particularly involving the pharmaceutical sector with law firms, civil society and governments.