Dr. Lily Ackerman is an associate in the Intellectual Property Practice Group in Morrison & Foerster’s San Francisco office. Her current practice areas include clean technology, biofuels, agricultural biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, catalysis, materials science, molecular diagnostics, and nanotechnology. Dr. Ackerman has experience with the preparation and prosecution of U.S. and international patent applications, patent portfolio analyses, freedom to operate analyses, patent infringement and validity analyses, patent re-examinations, and patent due diligence. She has also been involved with the firm’s litigation group, assisting with patent litigation, as well as the firm’s technology transactions group, assisting with patent license agreements.
Dr. Ackerman received her J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. While attending law school, she served on the Berkeley Law and Technology Journal, and worked with the California Asylum Representation Clinic, representing asylum seekers before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services San Francisco Asylum Office.
Prior to attending law school, Dr. Ackerman was a senior staff scientist at Symyx Technologies, where she used high-throughput screening technology platforms for homogeneous and heterogeneous catalyst discovery and development. She served as a National Science Foundation International Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Amsterdam, where she synthesized and studied ethylene oligomerization catalysts with dendrimeric ligand scaffolds. She received her Ph.D. in inorganic and organometallic chemistry as a National Science Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow from the California Institute of Technology. During her graduate studies, she investigated fundamental reaction kinetics and mechanisms relevant to olefin polymerization and selective alkane oxidation catalysis and was a visiting scientist at Oxford University. Her research efforts have resulted in granted U.S. patents, U.S. and foreign patent applications, and publications in major scientific journals.