Lisa Larrimore Ouellette is the Deane F. Johnson Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life at Stanford Law School, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Her research focuses on intellectual property law and innovation policy, drawing on her training in physics. She has written about how scientific expertise might improve patent examination, the informational value of patent disclosures, patenting publicly funded research under the Bayh–Dole Act, equity in patent inventorship, and the relationship between IP and other innovation-policy levers. She has applied these ideas to biomedical innovation challenges including the opioid epidemic, COVID-19, vaccines, and pharmaceutical prices. Her scholarship also addresses doctrinal puzzles in patent and trademark law, the effects of AI on patent practice, and how differing standards of review can create “deference mistakes.”

Professor Ouellette is an acclaimed teacher and nationally recognized expert in intellectual property law. She coauthored the freely available patent law casebook Patent Law: Cases, Problems, and Materials, which has been adopted at more than 80 law schools. At Stanford, she has received the John Bingham Hurlbut Award for Excellence in Teaching and has designed and led pedagogy training for other faculty. Her commentary has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and Slate. She is a member of the American Law Institute and served on a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to recommend strategies for better aligning medical innovation with disease burden and unmet needs.

Professor Ouellette has held visiting professorships at NYU and Columbia Law Schools. Before joining the Stanford faculty, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. She clerked for Judge Timothy B. Dyk of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Judge John M. Walker, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an Articles Editor of the Yale Law Journal, a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University, and a B.A. in physics from Swarthmore College. She has also conducted scientific research at the Max Planck Institute, CERN, and NIST.