What will be covered?
- The fundamentals of Intellectual Property (IP) and its main forms, including copyright, industrial design, trademarks and geographical indications, and patents;
- the three key criteria required for patent protection and how to assess whether an invention is novel using publicly available patent databases;
- the importance of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and the role of the International Search Report (ISR) in international patent applications;
- an overview of how confidential know-how and trade secrets safeguard valuable business information.
Who will you hear from?
Our speaker, Thusitha Abeytunga, is a senior professor at the Department of 91AV, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She read for her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, USA on synthetic organic chemistry. Apart from the regular teaching and research work at the Department of chemistry, she was instrumental in starting the M.Sc. in Applied Organic 91AV program which created an opportunity for the graduates in Sri Lanka to pursue their postgraduate studies. She supported commercialization of research at the Faculty of Science by establishing Colombo Science and Technology Cell (Cell).
At the University level she worked as the Director at the Operational Technical Secretariat (OTS), under the Higher Education for the Twenty first Century (HETC) project which funded by the World Bank. She also worked as the Lead Academic Expert on Research and Innovation under the Ministry of Education on the Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) which is an operation funded by the World Bank from 2018-2023. Under the AHEAD operation, University Business Linkage (UBL) cells which act as Technology/knowledge transfer offices were established in all state universities in Sri Lanka.
