Dr. Ikechi Mgbeoji is a Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. In addition to his present position at York, Mgbeoji was sworn in as the Commissioner of Education for Abia State, Nigeria, in 2015 and is a senior lawyer with Blackfriars LLP in Lagos. He joined Open AIR at its inception in 2011 and conducted the case study African Patent Offices Not Fit for Purpose, published in 2014.

Prior to joining Osgoode Hall in Toronto, Mgbeoji taught in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Dr. Mgbeoji received his LLM (cum laude) from Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he specialised in commercial litigation and intellectual property (IP) law and was awarded the Canadian Governor-General’s Gold Medal for the highest academic standing at graduate level. He went on to complete a PhD in Patent Law, graduating cum laude (Dalhousie).

Mgbeoji has won numerous academic awards including the Killam Scholarship and the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft Award. Mgbeoji is the author of two books: Collective Insecurity: The Liberian Crisis, Unilateralism and Global Order (UBC Press, 2003), and Global Biopiracy: Patents, Plants and Indigenous Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 2006). He is also joint author of Environmental Law in Developing Countries: Selected Issues (IUCN, 2001). His teaching and research interests are in: patent law; trademarks; copyrights; trade secrets; international law on use of force; international environmental law; biotechnology law; comparative IP law; indigenous peoples; and anthropology.