Jorge L. Contreras joins the faculty of the University of Utah as an associate professor at the S.J. Quinney College of Law and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Human Genetics at the School of Medicine. Contreras teaches in the areas of intellectual property, law and science and property law. He has previously served on the law faculties of American University Washington College of Law and Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, professor Contreras was a partner at the international law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where he practiced transactional and intellectual property law in Boston, London and Washington, D.C.

Professor Contreras’s current research focuses, among other things, on the development of technical standards and the use and dissemination of data generated by large-scale scientific research projects. He is an internationally recognized authority in the area of standards-essential patents and has been a leader in the development of the legal and policy aspects of genomic and biomedical research for nearly two decades. He has written and spoken extensively on the institutional and intellectual property structures of technical standardization and biomedical research, and his published work has appeared in scientific, legal and policy journals including Science, Nature Biotechnology, Jurimetrics, American University Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Antitrust Law Journal, Santa Clara Law Review and Utah Law Review (forthcoming). He recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume exploring legal issues at the intersection of biological and computational science, Bioinformatics Law: Legal Issues for Computational Biology in the Post-Genome Era (Chicago: ABA Publishing, 2013), and is a frequent speaker and commentator on these issues.  He has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Korea Times and other national and international media outlets, has appeared on National Public Radio and various televised broadcasts, and has been cited with approval by both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission.

Professor Contreras currently serves co-chair of the Technical Standardization Committee of the ABA’s Section of Science & Technology Law, and a member of the Advisory Council of the National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS), the Cures Acceleration Network (CAN) Board of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Intellectual Property Rights Policy Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).  He has recently completed a six-year term as co-chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, and has served as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes and the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research at NIH.

Professor Contreras is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (JD) and Rice University (BA, BSEE) and the 2014 recipient of the Elizabeth Payne Cubberly Scholarship Award at American University.  He has received numerous other awards and accolades throughout his career.