Robert Cerpa is a registered patent agent with more than three decades of experience in supporting strategic  counseling and in patent drafting and prosecution before the United States Patent and Trademark Office, as well as supporting coordination of patent prosecution efforts before the European Patent Office, Japanese Patent Office, and other jurisdictions.

Robert also has substantial experience supporting prior art searches in the chemical and biotechnology fields, assisting with intellectual property portfolio evaluations, and providing support in litigation matters, and in patent interferences.

Robert has prosecuted patent applications in several areas of chemistry and biotechnology, including small-molecule pharmaceuticals, peptides and proteins, DNA compositions, bioinformatics, liposomes, scientific instrumentation, inorganic catalysts, and materials science.

Robert received his bachelor's degree cum laude in chemistry from Harvard University, where he did research involving semiconductor photoelectrochemistry. After graduation, he worked at Harvard as a research assistant in the laboratory of Professor James G. Anderson, studying atmospheric chemistry and laser spectroscopy of gas phase species.

He then worked at Rockefeller University in the laboratory of the late Professor Emil T. Kaiser, in the field of peptide chemistry and bioorganic chemistry. Robert obtained his Ph.D. degree in biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, in the laboratory of Professor Irwin D. Kuntz, where he studied peptide structure using nuclear magnetic resonance, circular dichroism, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, and other techniques. Robert was the recipient of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship in graduate school, and also received a President's Dissertation Year Fellowship from the University of California.