Smeal Professor Awarded Fulbright Research Chair

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (May 21, 2009) – Daniel Cahoy, associate professor of business law at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, has been selected to receive a Fulbright award to study how different governments reconcile conflicts between human rights and intellectual property law.

Cahoy will spend the fall 2009 semester at the University of Ottawa in Canada as the Fulbright Visiting Chair in International Humanitarian Law. His research will focus on the perceived conflict between human rights and intellectual property rights, specifically looking at how different regimes balance the need to protect property rights in the pharmaceutical industry while also increasing access to needed medicines in developing countries.

In 2005, Canada passed legislation enabling the country to export generic pharmaceuticals to impoverished nations through patent compulsory licenses, which allow countries to manufacture cheaper versions of patented pharmaceuticals for non-commercial use or in cases of health care emergencies. Cahoy's research efforts in Ottawa will center on this legislation, what led to its adoption, and how it differs from approaches adopted by other countries, particularly the United States.

"The primary focus of this work will be an in-depth analysis of the theoretical, social, and economic nuances in the effort to increase access to medicines through compulsory licensing of patents," Cahoy writes in his Fulbright project statement. "A secondary focus of the proposed research will be to provide a broad overview of the landscape of human rights and intellectual property conflicts."

This latest project is an extension of a line of research Cahoy has been pursuing on the legal balancing act between IP rights and public access. In the 2007 paper "Confronting Myths and Myopia on the Road from Doha," he proposed a three-tiered approach to enable international governments to compensate pharmaceutical patent owners based on their ability to pay. Another paper, co-authored by Cahoy last year, examines the impact of patent compulsory licenses on foreign direct investment.

Cahoy is a patent attorney licensed to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and is admitted to the New York State Bar and several federal courts. Prior to joining the Smeal faculty in 2001, he practiced law in New York City at the intellectual property-oriented law firm of Fitzpatrick, Cella, Harper & Scinto, where he specialized in complex patent litigation. In addition to his research work at Smeal, Cahoy teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in intellectual property law, technology law, and general business law.

Prior to Cahoy, the last Smeal faculty member to receive a Fulbright grant was Sajay Samuel, clinical associate professor of accounting, who spent several months this spring at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon, teaching in the university's MBA and executive MBA programs, presenting research papers, and assisting in some AUB curricula redesigns. Before Samuel, Anthony Warren, Farrell Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, was awarded a Fulbright to spend the 2006-2007 academic year at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in Austria and at the University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia.

The Fulbright Program, America's flagship international education exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Since its establishment in 1945, more than 279,000 American and foreign university students, K-12 teachers, and university faculty and professionals have participated in Fulbright exchange programs.

Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievements and because they have demonstrated extraordinary leadership potential in their fields. Among the thousands of prominent Fulbright Scholar alumni are Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist; Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; and Craig Barrett, chair of Intel Corporation.