Who is behind the Lens

Osmat Jefferson PhD MInt Law

Osmat Jefferson PhD MInt Law

Research Fellow

Osmat is currently a research fellow the Lens product and assists in the development of the various capabilities available in the open and global platform, Lens.org. She joined Cambia in 2005 as a lab scientist and her research interests expanded to complex adaptive systems, mainly the biological innovation systems and so she moved with the Lens team to designing and developing open public resources that enable and engage different stakeholders in the use of transparency and evidence-based approaches in problem solving.

Among these resources, The patent citations and sequence facilities encompassing:
  1. a mapping application, PatCite, that enables researchers, patent professionals, and policy makers to map who is citing who in the academic and patenting worlds,
  2. a granular and dynamic metric, In4M, that measures scholarship influence on industry (https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4049) or used as a partnering tool, and
  3. The patent sequence toolkit (PatSeq) that links diverse patent-derived attributes with genetic sequences and their scientific information. Moreover, the toolkit provides navigation capabilities at various levels to collect signals on what is subject for patenting and what is not, explore patenting patterns across genomes, and zoom in to compare patent claims (see the article in Nature Biotech. In May 2014, a summary of this work was also featured by WIPO magazine.
Additional contributions include:
Osmat's scientific and legal background includes a master degree in Plant sciences from the American University of Beirut, a Ph.D. from Cornell University in that field focusing on plant virology with minors in ecology, international agriculture, and biochemistry, and another master’s degree in International Law from the Australian National University.  She has also had extensive training and experience in patent data analysis. Osmat began her career as a research virologist in Latin American and then had her own lab for five years at the international organization, IRRI, in the Philippines, training students and researchers in South and Southeast Asia, and building public capabilities across national lab facilities. She held several joint appointments with universities in Asia and since 2009, Osmat has also held dual appointments with Queensland University of Technology’s Faculty of Science and Law. She is currently a visiting fellow at the BEST Center.
Among her most recent publications:
  • Jefferson, O.A., Koellhofer, D., Warren, B. et al. Mapping innovation trajectories on SARS-CoV-2 and its variants. Nat Biotechnol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-00849-z and
  • Jefferson, O.A. et al. Mapping CRISPR-Cas9 public and commercial innovation using The Lens institutional toolkit (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-021-00237-y
In addition, Osmat is interested in gender and governance issues at international organisations and has published on the standard of justice system at International Labor Organisation Administrative Tribunal in March 2016 (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=496301). Osmat also enjoys pencil drawing, watercoloring, and gardening.
Additional Profiles:
Affiliations
  • Professor, QUT
Languages
  • Arabic
  • French
  • Spanish
Presentations