Professor Dianne Nicol, University of Tasmania

Thomson Reuters is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Dianne Nicol as one of the new co-General Editors for the Australian Intellectual Property Journal.

Dianne is a professor of law at the University of Tasmania in Australia and director of the Centre for Law and Genetics (CLG), which is housed in the Law Faculty. The broad theme of the CLG’s research is the regulation of biotechnology, human genetics and genomics and stem cell technology. Dianne’s research at the CLG particularly focuses on the legal and social issues associated with the commercialisation of genetic knowledge and patenting of genetic inventions. She is also more broadly interested in a range of aspects of intellectual property law in her teaching and research.

She has held a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) discovery grants and currently leads two ARC funded projects, one on the legal, research ethics and social issues associated with genomic data sharing and the other on the regulation of innovative health technologies. Dianne also holds the role of Chair of Academic Senate at the University of Tasmania. In 2012 Dianne was appointed to a three-member expert panel to review pharmaceutical patenting in Australia. She has also been a member of two principal committees of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Health Ethics Committee and the Embryo Research Licensing Committee in the triennium from 2015 to 2018 and the Gene Technology Ethics and Community Consultative Committee of the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator from 2017 to 2018. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.

Professor David Brennan, UTS Sydney

Thomson Reuters also warmly welcomes the return of Professor David Brennan as co-General Editor on the AIPJ. David is a Visiting Academic at the University of Technology Sydney and currently teaches copyright law at Monash University. Formerly a professor of patent law at Oxford University, he specialises in the fields of patent and copyright law, with a particular focus on their connections with contracts, property, restitution, international and trade law. David served as General Editor from 2007 to 2012, prior to the current General Editor Professor David Lindsay taking on the role.

David received his law degree from University of Melbourne in 1992 and completed his PhD from the same university in 2003. He has been involved in Australian copyright law reform activities for decades and is a consultant for Screenrights, a rights management organisation in Australia.

We anticipate the upcoming issues of AIPJ under the strong leadership and guidance of this formidable trio of experts, and look forward to working with them in the future.