Visiting Researcher
2023

Christy Kollmar joined the Petrie-Flom Center as a Visiting Researcher during the winter of 2023. During her stay, she conducted targeted research on the potential of emerging technologies stemming from regulatory sandboxes in the healthcare and life science arenas from a legal and business perspective, with a specific focus on understanding and developing competition-related regulatory approaches to catalyze the emergence of cutting-edge products, technology and innovation. In November 2021, she joined the Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law (CeBIL), at the University of Copenhagen as a postdoctoral researcher, where her research analyzed the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst of change with a particular focus on competition/antitrust law perspectives and how the crisis provided stimulus for new antitrust approaches to promote enhanced collaboration, improved global pharmaceutical innovation and the attainment of greater legal, economic and humanitarian impact. Her research also probed into how the lessons learned could be used for the future of biomedical innovation and pandemic preparedness, as well as, for other grand challenges, such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance.

In September 2021, she was conferred her PhD title through the Centre for Market and Economic Law (CME) at the University of Copenhagen where her research analyzed vertical restraints in the digital age, specifically focusing on the assessment, application and enforcement of resale price maintenance. In this capacity, she also held appointments as a visiting researcher at the University of Zürich, the Directorate-General of Competition at the European Commission (DG COMP), the University College Dublin, and the Irish Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), where she was commissioned as an Authorised Officer to conduct empirical semi-structured interviews of 34 National Competition Authorities across Europe regarding their different approaches to vertical restraint enforcement to uncover the most important challenges needing modification to enhance the overall efficacy, transparency and sustainability of the current vertical legal regime. Her dissertation was published by Routledge – Taylor & Francis Group in 2023 under the converted title “Resale Price Maintenance and the Law: The Future of Vertical Restraints” (ISBN 9781032315485).

Christy has been a licensed practicing attorney in the United States since 2007 and is a member of the District of Columbia, Wyoming, Montana and Washington bars, including five federal court jurisdictions (the District Courts of Montana, Wyoming and Western Washington, and the 9th and 10th Circuit Courts). From a practitioner perspective, she spent four years as a prosecuting attorney focused on drug and familial abuse crimes, and currently maintains her own US federal and state-level criminal defense practice (Kollmar Law Office, PLLC.) focused on felony criminal litigation. In terms of academics, after obtaining her Baccalaureate of Arts (BA) from University of Montana, a Juris Doctorate (JD) from Nova Southeastern University, a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) from the College of William & Mary – Mason School of Business, and a Masters of Global Management (MGM) from Thunderbird School of Global Management, she relocated to Europe and attained a Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Riga Graduate School of Law, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Law (Ph.D.) from University of Copenhagen focused in comparative antitrust law and economics. Christy’s academic portfolio comprises diverse supervision and lecturing in EU Law, Comparative Contracts, EU Competition Law and Economics, and Legal Research Methods.