Personal Profile

Prof. dr. Esther van Zimmeren is Research Professor in “IP Law & Governance” at the Faculty of Law of the University of Antwerp (UAntwerp) and Member of the Research Groups Government & Law and Business and Law. She is also the Coordinator of the Module Law & International Business of the Master of Laws Program.

She has particular expertise in intellectual property (IP) law and IP governance, innovation policy, technology transfer, competition law, contract law, European internal market law and international trade law. Many of her research projects and publications are interdisciplinary: in the past she has worked with geneticists, economists, physicists, philosophers, artists and social scientists and currently she has collaborations with political scientists, urban developers and economists.

Before her appointment at the University of Antwerp, she worked as an assistant professor at the University of Liège (2011-2013) and as a research fellow, a PhD researcher and a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Intellectual Property Rights of the KU Leuven (2004-2013). In 2011, she obtained her PhD from the KU Leuven for her research entitled “Towards a New Patent Paradigm in the Biomedical Sector? Facilitating Access, Open Innovation and Social Responsibility in Patent Law in the US, Europe and Japan”. Between 2002-2004 she was a legal assistant at the General Court of the EU in Luxembourg.

Professor van Zimmeren has frequently been invited as a visiting scholar to various prominent universities and research institutes around the world, including the University of California, Berkeley (2008); Duke University (2013); Gakushuin University in Tokyo (2013); Hanken Business School in Helsinki (2012); the Brocher Foundation in Geneva (2011) and the Institute of Intellectual Property in Tokyo (2008).