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Coffee & Career: Roman Melnik

Join us for our Coffee & Career series at Little Chandler, on the west end of Chandler Cafe. All postdocs and graduate students are welcome!

Professor Roman Melnik M.S. J.D. teaches patent law as a Lecturer in Law at USC Law School, and is also a practicing patent litigator. He has handled a number of high profile cases, including the Spiderman patent case in the United States Supreme Court, and has also testified as an expert witness on patent law.

Roman started out as a chemist (A.B. Harvard '89, M.S. U.C. Berkeley '90), specializing in bioorganic chemistry, but switched to law after realizing that while he liked puzzling out scientific problems, he was hopeless in the lab. After law school (Columbia '94), Roman became a partner at Irell & Manella LLP, one of the foremost patent litigation firms in the country, and then transitioned into teaching and independent consulting.

In addition to teaching law students, Roman has, from time to time, taught a special patent law class for graduate students in science and engineering to help prepare them for their future role as inventors. Roman will speak about full-time and part-time career options in patent law for scientists and engineers.

About the Series
Coffee & Career is a career-related series organized by Caltech Postdoc Association (CPA). It is held every first and third Tuesday of the month from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. The goal of this series is to introduce postdocs and graduate students to role models—from both academia and industry—to whom they can relate, and from whom they can gain insights from their career paths.
For more information, please contact Arslan Ahmed by email at [email protected].