Dr Olga Gurgula
Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law (Patent law)

Summary

Olga is a lecturer in intellectual property law at the Brunel Law School. She teaches various elements of IP law, including patents, designs, plant varieties and trade secrets, as well as IP-related topics, such as patents and access to medicines, anticompetitive patent strategies in the pharmaceutical industry, and international policies and trade-related matters in agriculture.

Olga is a lecturer and course convenor of the Patent Law and Practice module (part of the Intellectual Property Postgraduate Certificate designed for trainee patent attorneys and accredited by the Intellectual Property Regulation Board) and the Philosophical Foundations of Intellectual Property Law. She also contributes to the teaching of other IP-related modules at the postgraduate level and teaches intellectual property law and English contract law at the undergraduate level.

Olga holds a Visiting Fellow position at the Oxford Martin School, the University of Oxford. She is a member of the Oxford Martin Programme on Affordable Medicines, working on the ‘open innovation in drug development’ project to facilitate the accessibility and affordability of medicines. Olga is regularly commissioned for policy briefs, governmental studies, and consultations, including those funded by the UK FCO/DFID and the World Bank. As a research coordinator, Olga led a research team in a FCO/DFID project that provided technical assistance to the Ukrainian government on the establishment and operation of a new specialised IP court in Ukraine. She also acted as an international IP expert in a United Nations Development Programme project that assisted the government of Kazakhstan in developing its new IP strategy 2021-25. She advises a large patient organisation in Ukraine on its policy work on improving access to medicines, including changes to patent and competition laws.  

Before joining the Brunel Law School, Olga was a lecturer in intellectual property law at the Aston Law School, where she taught intellectual property law to law and business students. Prior to her lectureship at Aston University, Olga worked as a research associate at Queen Mary University of London. 

Qualifications

Olga qualified as a Ukrainian attorney in 2004. Before the commencement of her PhD research in 2013, she worked in private practice for over ten years. She counselled on a wide range of IP and corporate matters and was involved in numerous litigation proceedings concerning a wide range of commercial and civil disputes.

Responsibility

Since 2018, Olga has been acting as:

• LLM dissertation convener, and
• Research ethics coordinator