Andrew W. Torrance
Andrew W. Torrance is the Paul E. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Law and associate dean of graduate and international law at the University of Kansas School of Law. He is also a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and co-founder of PatentVector.
His research focuses on intellectual property, patent law, innovation, biotechnology, biolaw, food and drug regulation, biodiversity, and empirical approaches to law. Drawing on his training in both law and biology, his work has examined issues involving biotechnology, genetically modified organisms, synthetic biology, conservation, and collaborative innovation.
Torrance previously led the intellectual property department at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Washington School of Law and taught biology, conservation biology, and environmental policy at Harvard University. Before entering academia full time, he practiced biotechnology patent law at Fish & Richardson and served as patent counsel at Inverness Medical Innovations.
Torrance founded the annual Biolaw Conference and co-founded PatCon, an annual academic conference on patent law. He received the University of Kansas Scholarly Achievement Award in 2015.
Torrance earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School, a Ph.D. and master’s in biology from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s in biology, with honors, from Queen’s University in Canada.
