Colleen Chien

Colleen Chien is a Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law where she teaches, writes, and mentors students. From 2013-2015 she served in the Obama White House as a Senior Advisor, Intellectual Property and Innovation. She is also a visiting Scholar at the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, where she works on leveraging computational techniques and machine learning to advance access to justice, diversity in tech, and criminal justice reform.

Professor Chien is nationally known for her research and publications on domestic and international patent law and policy issues. She has testified on multiple occasions before Congress, the DOJ, the FTC, and the US Patent and Trademark Office. In 2017, Professor Chien was awarded the American Law Institute’s Early Career Medal, awarded every two years to up to two law outstanding professors; she also has received the Vanguard Award for Public Service, and has been named Eric Yamamoto Emerging Scholar, a Tech Law Leader, one of Silicon Valley’s “Women of Influence,” one of the 50 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property in the world. Chien is a graduate of Stanford (Engineering) and Berkeley Law Schools and lives in Oakland with her husband and their two sons. She is the founder of civic engagement projects Wall of Us and ActLocal and an advisor to ClearAccessIP, an AI-driven patent analytics and enterprise software firm and CitizenBe, which works to create and sustain impactful political participation.

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