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, California Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Texas Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, and American Economics Journal:  Economic Policy. Professor Wasserman serves as one of forty Public Members of the Administrative Conference of the United States and served on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association.   

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.

She is currently serving as a Co-Principal Investigator on an R01 award from the NIH, which seeks to build a database that links patents to FDA approved biologics and to estimate the relationship between the examination time allotted to examiners and the likelihood that patents that read on FDA approved biologics meet the legal patentability requirements.    

Professor Wasserman received her B.S. in chemical engineering with high honors from Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. 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 J.D. 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.