Dr. Tesh Dagne’s areas of research interest include: national and international intellectual property (IP) law; IP and development; IP and agri-biotechnology innovations; indigenous knowledge and indigenous peoples’ rights; biodiversity conservation and ecological protection; international legal regimes and the concept of food sovereignty; and international trade law and the environment.

Dagne completed his JSD at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, in Halifax, and his doctoral dissertation was published as Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge in the Global Economy: Translating Geographical Indications for Development (Routledge, 2014). He obtained his LLB from the Faculty of Law at Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University, and his LLM from the University of Calgary.

Dagne joined Open AIR at its inception in 2011, and was a researcher and co-author of a case study published in 2014 as Geographical Indication (GI) Options for Ethiopian Coffee and Ghanaian Cocoa.