Professor Colleen V. Chien

Professor Colleen Chien is an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law. She 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. From 2013-2015 she served in the Obama Administration 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 of patent-assertion entities (PAEs) (a term she coined), patent litigation, and the secondary market for patents. Her work has been featured in popular outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as in academic publications including the Texas Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review.

Professor Chien is a recipient of the American Law Institute Early Career (“Young Scholar”) Medal and has been named a Eric Yamamoto Emerging Scholar, one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property and one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence.”

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 did stints 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). She lives in the east bay with her husband and their two sons.