Stuart Graham

Chief Economist, US Patent & Trademark Office

The USPTO established the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) in March 2010, with the appointment of Dr. Stuart Graham as its first Chief Economist. The Chief Economist is responsible for advising the Under Secretary and the Administrator for External Affairs on the economic implications of policies and programs affecting the United States intellectual property system. The Chief Economist initiates and oversees groundbreaking economic analysis in the field on the topics of intellectual property protection and enforcement, with the object of fulfilling the USPTO’s statutory obligation to provide the President (through the Secretary of Commerce) and the Administration with advice on intellectual property policy.

Dr. Stuart Graham is the Chief Economist at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, where he is on leave from his academic post at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Graham conducts research on the economics of the patent system, intellectual property (IP) transactions, and the relationship of IP to entrepreneurship and the commercialization of new technologies. He received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds other advanced degrees in Law (JD), Business (MBA), and Information Systems (MA). An attorney licensed in New York State, he has written on companies’ intellectual property and litigation strategies, patenting by hi-tech startups and entrepreneurs, and comparisons of the US and European patent systems. His recent research has been published in the journal Science, the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, the Annals of Economics and Statistics, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, and the journal Management Science, among other venues.

Dr. Graham has testified about the patent system in hearings before the US Federal Trade Commission, and has served as a scientific expert to the European Patent Office, the European Trademark Office (OHIM), Industry Canada, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). His research has attracted funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Tokyo Foundation, among others. He spent the 2007-2008 academic year at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (UC Berkeley Law School) as the Kauffman Foundation Fellow in Social Science and Law, and has been named a Robert Noyce Fellow in Industrial Competitiveness by the Intel Foundation, and a Gottfried Leibniz Fellow in Industrial Economics, a prominent grant by the German government.