IP-Watch Interns Provide Fresh Perspective, Solid Reporting

This spring, Intellectual Property Watch has had the pleasure of welcoming three talented interns/researchers who have provided not only their expertise but their enthusiasm for all aspects of intellectual property and have made an excellent addition to the team.

Coming from different backgrounds and countries, Julia Fraser, Maëli Astruc, and Joséphine De Ruyck have contributed to many articles, each of them spanning a diversity of intellectual property areas such as public health, agriculture, international trade, traditional knowledge, copyright, and information and communication technologies.

They also have been called upon to write numerous news and report briefs, book reviews, attend a wide range of meetings and events, represent IP-Watch in professional environments, produce a directory of country delegates in Geneva, and other responsibilities. IP-Watch followers have been the beneficiaries of their great productivity and good spirit.

Julia Fraser

Julia, an English/French national raised in the UK, is a law student from London, and started her internship with Intellectual Property Watch in January. She declared a special interest in intellectual property issues related to public health and access to medicines at the start of her internship and has proven true to her word. She has written a number of stories on the subject. For example, she did an exclusive interview with Greg Perry, executive director of the Medicines Patent Pool, on-site reporting at the annual meeting of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines Europe, an exclusive interview on hepatitis C with a top Abbott scientist, and provided extensive coverage at the World Health Assembly, in May.

Julia also has delved into other subjects, such as 3D printing, and climate change, as well as trademarks, copyrights and internet governance. Prior to her internship and developing an interest for the law, she studied biology and psychology at Edinburgh University, and did an internship in Paris working, among other things, on corporate social responsibility projects. Julia said she loves travelling and working abroad, and has indeed travelled the world. She worked for example at a cheetah conservation foundation in South Africa and a rescue centre for children in Cambodia.

“It has been a fast paced and very interesting experience working for Intellectual Property Watch,” she said. “I have learned so much on so many different areas of IP as well as had the opportunity to focus on particular areas of interest to me and meet and interview people working in those fields.”

Julia’s IP-Watch story list is here.

Maëli Astruc

Maëli joined Intellectual Property Watch a few weeks after Julia. A native of France, Maëli was born in Narbonne, in the sunny south of France. Maëli’s primary interests are agriculture and traditional knowledge, as well as internet governance. During her internship, she provided in-depth stories in areas such as the ratification by the European Union of the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biodiversity. She recently covered the topic of nutrition at the 67^th World Health Assembly.

Her interests also spanned several fields of IP, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization Committee on Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, where she focused on indigenous peoples’ perspectives, and other issues. While covering conferences in Geneva, she has also discovered a strong interest in the internet governance issue and more generally in the relation between IP and information and communications technology.

Before interning with Intellectual Property Watch, Maëli studied information technology for two years in Montpellier, France and then switched paths to study law. She holds a bachelor’s degree in law from the Narbonne Faculty of Law. She went on to study international law and graduated for her master’s degree in Aix-en-Provence, France, during which she joined a special program between Aix-en-Provence Faculty and the Faculty of Law in Ottawa, Canada. Maëli also holds an LL.M in law from the Faculty of Ottawa.

“I have had an enriching experience with Intellectual Property Watch, which bestowed me with great responsibilities to write my own stories, and gave me the opportunity to meet key people in the field of intellectual property,” Maëli said.

Maëli’s IP-Watch story list is here.

Joséphine De Ruyck

Joséphine came to Intellectual Property Watch from Brussels, Belgium. She is currently finishing an LL.M degree in intellectual property rights and information and communication technology (ICT) law at the University of Leuven.

Her primary focus was ICT, and she enthusiastically wrote a story on media and privacy invasion. However, Joséphine, during her internship deepened her interest in other areas of intellectual property, in particular public health, and intensively covered the discussions at the World Health Assembly, writing stories on subjects such as big data for health, and the role of innovation in this field.

Joséphine’s interest in intellectual property is longstanding. She holds an LL.M degree from Queen Mary University in London where she concentrated on law and development. She wrote her dissertation on the interface between climate change and intellectual property law in the context of the technology transfer of environmentally-friendly technology for the developing countries. She also holds a Masters’ degree in Law from the University of Louvain, and wrote her thesis on patent law and access to HIV medicines for the poorest populations. During these years, she had the wonderful opportunity to live and study at the University of Galatasaray in Istanbul, in the context of an Erasmus exchange programme.

Joséphine has also participated in different social projects outside university, as a volunteer both in Belgium and abroad, notably in Morocco for animating children in elementary schools and at the Samilia Foundation against human trafficking in Brussels. In her free time she loves travelling the world – she spent, for instance, more than 6 months in South America– reading Russian literature, and drawing outside.

“My internship at Intellectual Property watch provided me the great opportunity to deepen my legal knowledge in intellectual property around notable experts in this field,” she said. “I was also very enthusiastic to learn more about important international organisations ‘from the inside’ and to assist with high-level conferences at WIPO, WHO, and UN given their broad range of global activity,” she added.

Joséphine’s IP-Watch story list is here.