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Sapna Kumar

Professor Kumar is an expert in U.S. patent law and has written extensively about administrative and international law issues relating to patents. In her most recent article, Innovation Nationalism, she discusses how U.S. patent law can be used by the government to advance a nationalistic agenda.

Professor Kumar is a 2018–2019 Fulbright-Schuman Innovation Grant recipient. In Spring 2019, she will research the formation of the Unified Patent Court at the Center for International Intellectual Property Studies in Strasbourg and at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich. She is also a 2018 recipient of a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship that funded a four-week German language class at the Goethe Institute Freiburg. 

Professor Kumar received her J.D. at the University of Chicago, where she served as a staff member of the University of Chicago Law Review. From 2003 to 2006, she practiced intellectual property litigation in Chicago at Kirkland & Ellis LLP and at Pattishall McAuliffe. She then spent two years at Duke University Law School, where she was a Faculty Fellow and part of the Center for Genome Ethics Law & Policy. After completing her fellowship, Professor Kumar clerked for the Honorable Judge Kenneth F. Ripple on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Professor Kumar is also passionate about teaching. She has received both the University of Houston Teaching Excellence award and the Student Bar Association's Faculty of the Year award.