Ryan Abbott, MD, JD, MTOM, PhD is Professor of Law and Health Sciences at the University of Surrey School of Law and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He has published widely on issues associated with law and technology, life sciences, and intellectual property in leading legal, medical, and scientific books and journals, including as the author of The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press, the editor of the Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence published in 2022 by Edward Elgar, and an author of the textbook International Intellectual Property in an Integrated World Economy, Fifth Edition published in 2024 by Aspen Publishing.
Professor Abbott’s research has been featured prominently in the popular press, including in The Times of London, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and other media outlets involving time. He routinely gives keynote lectures and presents internationally in academic (e.g., MIT, Stanford, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge), government (e.g., World Intellectual Property Organization, World Trade Organization, UK Intellectual Property Office), and industry (e.g., Novartis, IBM, Swiss Re, Fujifilm) settings. Professor Abbott has served as an expert, or presented evidence, to the U.S. Senate, U.K. House of Lords, and the European Commission. He has won numerous awards for his thought leadership and legal advocacy work, including being named as one of the fifty most influential people in intellectual property by Managing Intellectual Property magazine.
Professor Abbott is a mediator and arbitrator with JAMS and a panelist with a variety of national and international dispute resolution service providers. He is a CEDR-accredited mediator and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (FCIArb). He is also a partner at Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan, LLP, where he focuses on litigation in the life sciences and technology industries, and he has appeared as lead counsel in numerous state and federal courts as well as in foreign courts including the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
Professor Abbott is a licensed physician, patent attorney, and acupuncturist in the United States, and a solicitor advocate in England and Wales. He is board-certified by the American Board of Legal Medicine (ABLM). Professor Abbott is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine (MD), the Yale Law School (JD), University of Surrey School of Law (PhD), as well as a Summa Cum Laude graduate from Emperor’s College (MTOM) and a Summa Cum Laude graduate from University of California, Los Angeles (BS).
