OIPRC Academic Visitors
Dr Titilayo Adebola (May 2023 - July 2023)
Dr Titilayo Adebola is the Theme Coordinator for Intellectual Property Law and Associate Director of the Centre for Commercial Law at the University of Aberdeen School of Law. Her research expertise lies in international economic law with a focus on intellectual property rights, food, agriculture, environment, technology and gender. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Dr Adebola is the President of the African International Economic Law Network, a Senior Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and an Expert Member of the African Continental Free Trade Area’s Intellectual Property Drafting Team. She is the Founding Editor of Flora IP, an innovative resource on food, agriculture, and intellectual property and an Editor on Afronomicslaw.org a leading resource on international economic law. Dr Adebola holds an LLB from Olabisi Onabanjo University as well as an LLM and PhD from the University of Warwick.
Professor Dr. Cyrill Rigamonti
Professor Cyrill Rigamonti is a tenured professor at the University of Bern, where he teaches intellectual property and competition law, and also serves as Chair of the Department for Economic Law and as Faculty Director of the Center for the Law of Innovation and Competition (CLIC). He is also the President of the Swiss Copyright Tribunal.
Professor Rigamonti is a graduate of Harvard Law School (S.J.D.), Georgetown University Law Center (LL.M.), and the University of Zurich (J.D./Ph.D.) and is admitted to practice in New York and Switzerland. He also earned a habilitation from the University of Bern. He was the first legal scholar to be awarded the Prix Jubilé from the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. His writing has also earned him the Mancini and Addison Brown prizes from Harvard Law School.
Professor Juan Antonio Vives-Vallés ( January - November 2023)
Juan Antonio Vives-Vallés is Profesor contratado doctor interino at the Department of Private Law of the University of the Balearic Islands, and Researcher at the Department of Agrifood Production and Protection of the Agri-Environmental and Water Economics Institute (Palma, Spain).
Juan graduated in Agricultural Engineering and in Law at the University of the Balearic Islands (Palma, Spain); a M. Ag. from the ETSEA (Lleida, Spain); a M. Sc. from the IREC (Ciudad Real, Spain); an Executive MBA from IE Business School (Madrid, Spain), and an LL. M. in Intellectual Property and Competition Law from the MIPLC (Munich, Germany). He also received training in Intellectual Property, and in Plant Breeders’ Rights, by: KIPO-WIPO-KAIST-KIPA, UPOV, WIPO, Wageningen University & Research – Naktuinbouw (the Netherlands Inspection Service for Horticulture), etc.
As a researcher, he specializes on cross-cutting research between agronomy/live sciences and law, mainly focusing on Intellectual Property in agriculture and other related topics.
Juan has held a number of visiting positions at a number of institutions including: the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition; the Community Plant Variety Office (Angers, France); Department of Plant Breeding of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Alnarp, Sweden), the STSM programme of the EU COST Action CA18111; Naktuinbouw (Roelofarendsveen, The Netherlands); and the OECD Co-operative Research Programme Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems (CRP).
He has also been Guest Associate Editor within the section of Plant Breeding in Frontiers in Plant Science. He promoted the creation, and also coordinates, the international research network “Intellectual Property in Agriculture”, formed by the University of the Balearic Islands (Palma, Spain), the University of Alicante (Alicante, Spain), the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche – Istituto di Ricerca su Innovazione e Servizi per lo Sviluppo (Naples, Italy), the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznan, Poland), the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw, Poland), the Dept. of Plant Breeding of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Alnarp, Sweden), the Faculty of Law of the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and the Agri-Environmental and Water Economics Institute (Palma, Spain).
He is also cofounder and Director of the Laboratory for Innovation in Agriculture of the University of the Balearic Islands. In early 2019 he was appointed Member of the Legal Expert Group of the European Observatory of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (Alicante, Spain). And he is Principal Investigator of the PVP-DT Project - “The Spanish and the Community plant variety protection systems in the age of digital transformation, challenges, and opportunities” (TED2021-129992A-I00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Dr Xiaoren Wang (May - September 2023)
Dr Xiaoren Wang is a lecturer in IP law at the University of Dundee and a research fellow at CREATe, University of Glasgow. She focuses on empirical research on IP issues including trade marks, copyright and digital platforms. She is also interested in the law and economic analysis in the fields of IP law and frontier technologies.
During her academic visit at Oxford, she completed a quantitative study on colour trade mark depletion, analysing 858 single-colour trade marks in the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database.
Xiaoren graduated from the University of Illinois (J.S.D and LLM). After that, she worked as a post-doctoral Global Fellow at the New York University and a Max Web fellow in the European University Institute (EUI). Xiaoren currently serves as the Cyberlaw convenor of the Society of Legal Scholar (SLS), hosts the CREATe Trade Mark Seminar Series and co-leads the Scottish Law and Innovation Network (SCOTLIN).