Lois Muraguri

I head the Policy and External Affairs department, which is responsible for partnerships, advocacy, policy and communications.

Kenyan & British

June 2010

I am a lawyer with an LL.M (Warwick University, UK) and a Ph.D (Queen Mary, University of London, UK) specialising in intellectual property in product development and public-private partnerships in the context of development. My thesis primarily looked at organisational, national and international policies and processes and how they interface with product-development partnerships to effectively translate research into pro-poor products.

I was formerly a research fellow in life sciences and development at the Innogen ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on innovation in genomics at the Open University, UK where I worked on policy issues in the context of technology product development public-private partnerships.

My career interests include: the dynamics of public-private partnerships in the context of technology transfer, the interface between intellectual property rights, the innovation process in health and agriculture and models for creating an enabling policy environment for translating research into viable marketable products in the pro-poor context. I have worked and consulted for the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) among others before joining GALVmed. I have also consulted for top London law firms on intellectual property matters and commercialisation of technology.

I am professionally drawn to anything challenging and complex such as finding synergies between actors to address poverty. I am particularly interested in how enabling environments can be created so that innovations can be practically and sustainably translated to solve development-related problems.