Professor of Law, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Law

Edmond J. Safra/Petrie-Flom Centers Joint Fellow-in-Residence Alumnus
2019-2020

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Petrie-Flom Center, 23 Everett St.
Cambridge, MA
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Jacob S. Sherkow is a Professor of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Law. Sherkow’s research focuses on how scientific developments, especially in the biosciences, affect patent law, regulation, and bioethics. He is the author of over 40 articles on these topics in both scientific journals and traditional law reviews, including Science, Nature, the Yale Law Journal, and the Stanford Law Review, for which he has won multiple prizes.

Sherkow’s work has been recognized by both the scientific and legal communities. In 2018, he was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine. He also currently serves as a community representative on the New York Genome Center’s Institutional Biosafety Committee; on the editorial board of a peer-reviewed scientific journal, the CRISPR Journal; and as an advisor to a committee of France’s National Assembly on issues concerning the patenting of biotechnological research tools.

Beyond his scholarship, Sherkow was the winner of the Class of 2017 Teaching Award, and has been a frequent commentator on patent matters in popular media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. He also regularly advises investment firms on matters pertaining to patent litigation in the biosciences.

Aside from his appointment at New York Law School, Sherkow is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a Permanent Visiting Professor at the Center for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL) at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law. Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Law School; a Fellow in the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School; and a patent litigator at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in New York. He was also a law clerk in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Sherkow graduated cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was an editor of the Michigan Law Review and the recipient of the Fred L. Leckie and James N. Adler Scholarships. He also holds an MA in biotechnology from Columbia University and a BSc from McGill University, where he majored in molecular biology and English literature. In addition to his legal training, Sherkow has several years of experience as a research scientist in molecular biology, is a certified Editor in the Life Sciences (BELS), and is an avid squash player. Sherkow is admitted to practice in New York, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

His recent scholarship is available on SSRN.