Melissa F. Wasserman

Melissa Wasserman joined the University of Texas law faculty in 2016. Her research focuses on the institutional design of innovation policy, with a particular emphasis on patent law and administrative law. Her articles have been published or are forthcoming in both student-edited law reviews and peer review journals including Stanford Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Texas Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Prior to joining the Texas faculty, she served as Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. Her work has been selected for presentation in the 2015 Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum and in 2012 she was awarded the University of Illinois College of Law’s Carroll P. Hurd Award for Excellence in Faculty Scholarship, which is given to the most outstanding piece of faculty scholarship published in the previous year.

Professor Wasserman received her BS in chemical engineering with high honors from Pennsylvania State University. She received her PhD in chemical engineering from Princeton for her work on the thermodynamics of network-forming liquids at low temperatures. As a graduate student, Professor Wasserman was both a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and American Association of University Women Selected Professions Fellow. She received her JD magna cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she served as an articles editor of New York University Law Review. Following law school, Professor Wasserman clerked for Judge Kimberly A. Moore of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and then was an academic fellow and lecturer at the Petrie Flom Center for Health Law, Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics.

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Decreasing the Patent Office’s Incentives to Grant Invalid Patents