Prof. Teshager (Tesh) W. Dagne is a tenured Associate Professor in the Professorial Stream at York University’s School of Public Policy and Administration and the Ontario Research Chair in Governing Artificial Intelligence. He is co-principal investigator on Open AIR’s IDRC-funded project, “Catalyzing AI’s potential in Africa through IP innovation,” which examines how intellectual property frameworks can support inclusive and context-responsive AI governance
across African innovation ecosystems. He is also an Associate Member of the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society.
A scholar of intellectual property, innovation governance, and emerging technologies regulation, Prof. Dagne’s research investigates how legal and policy frameworks shape the development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems. His work focuses on the interaction between intellectual property, privacy, and data governance regimes, and how these structures influence access to knowledge, allocation of rights in data, and the distribution of benefits arising from AI-driven innovation.
His scholarship spans sectors including health, agriculture, environmental resources, digital labour, biodiversity governance, and neurotechnologies. He pays particular attention to questions of data sovereignty, sustainability, and equity, especially as they affect Indigenous Peoples and marginalized communities in the Global South. As Ontario Research Chair, he advances interdisciplinary research on the institutional, ethical, and policy dimensions of AI-enabled systems.
Prof. Dagne earned his doctoral degree in law from Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law in 2012, where he was a Schulich Research Fellow. Prior to joining York University in 2023, he was a tenured Associate Professor at Thompson Rivers University Faculty of Law and has also taught at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law. He is the author and co-author of leading works including Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge in the Global Economy (2014) and Canadian Intellectual Property Law (2022).
