Professor Kathleen Liddell

Overview

Professor Kathy Liddell is the Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences (LML), and the Herschel Smith Reader of Intellectual Property and Medical Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. She is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School where she teaches Melbourne Law Masters courses on ‘Law and Emerging Health Technologies’ and ‘Pharmaceuticals: Current Legal Issues’. Her research focuses on health, medicine and society, with the aim of understanding and improving the legal frameworks that govern and support improvements in this field. She is an expert in intellectual property in the field of life sciences and has been the principal investigator for several large projects on IPRs and bioinnovation, including in relation to genomics, precision medicine, repurposing pharmaceuticals, and antimicrobial resistance. Professor Liddell has worked on policy reports for national health departments, national ethical advisory commissions, and the European Commission. She is the recipient of grants from (for example) the Wellcome Trust, the Philomathia Foundation, the Cambridge ESRC-Impact Acceleration Account, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Her expertise extends to other areas of life sciences including national and international regulation of clinical trials, medical negligence, biomaterials (including human tissue, cells, organs), the European GDPR, biodata (including large biobanks), pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and personalised and regenerative medicine. Professor Liddell uses a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies in her research including interviews, surveys and patent mapping. She studied law and natural sciences at the University of Melbourne before undertaking a Masters of Bioethics at Monash University and her doctorate in law at the University of Oxford. In addition to academia, Professor Liddell has worked in private legal practice and in the civil service.