A practising lawyer, Chikosa Banda divides his time between Malawi and the UK. He is a Law Lecturer and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL). He also consults on IP matters for the IQsensato international consultancy.

Banda lectures, researches and consults on matters of IP, access to justice, administrative justice, environmental law, bioethics, biotechnology regulation and human rights. He is a member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Commission on Environmental Law, and has done work for the Malawi government as well as several international organisations and NGOs.

Banda holds a a Bachelor of Law (Honours) from the University of Malawi and Master’s of Law (LLM) from the University of Essex, UK. His PhD research at Cambridge is focused on patents in relation to promotion of biomedical research and development (R&D) for underserved markets. He joined Open AIR in 2013.