Dean Danielle M. Conway and Professor Andrea M. Matwyshyn speaking at UVA School of Law

CARLISLE AND UNIVERSITY PARK, PA.— Penn State Dickinson Law and School of International Affairs Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law Danielle M. Conway and Professor Andrea M. Matwyshyn will serve as panelists at the Intellectual Property Rights in Government Contracting Symposium. The event is co-sponsored by The Virginia Journal of Law & Technology and the Center on Intellectual Property Law and will take place at the University of Virginia School of Law on April 17.

This symposium addresses critical gaps in legal scholarship on intellectual property rights in government contracting, where national security, constitutional protections, and private innovation intersect. The vision for the symposium and the invitations to contribute came from Professor Elizabeth A. Rowe, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law at the UVA School of Law and co-director of both the LawTech Center and the Center on Intellectual Property Law.

Conway and Matwyshyn accepted Rowe’s invitation to write articles for the journal and discuss their topics during the symposium. Conway, a nationally recognized expert in procurement and intellectual property law, penned an essay titled “A Look Back on the Foundations of Government Procurement of Intellectual Property in the New Era of ‘America First IP’ Ideology, Policy, and Legislation.” You can read the article by clicking here.

She will serve on a panel titled “The Innovation Compact—Bayh–Dole, Universities, and Capital,” which will examine how federal funding and the Bayh–Dole framework created today’s public-private innovation ecosystem and why recent governmental departures from that model threaten the stability of university research, technology transfer, and the venture-funded commercialization pipeline.

Matwyshyn, whose work focuses on the intersection of technology design, innovation policy, and law, wrote an article titled “Prospecting for Progress.” You can read the article by clicking here.

She will serve on a panel titled “From Secrecy to Stewardship—Building the Public Trust and Resilience in Procurement,” focusing on the public’s stake in government-held knowledge, examining how secrecy in procurement undermines oversight, why information should be treated as a public trust, and how resilience-oriented procurement models can correct systemic transparency and accountability failures.

Danielle M. Conway is the Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. A leading expert in procurement law, entrepreneurship, and intellectual property law, Dean Conway joined Penn State Dickinson Law after serving for four years as dean of the University of Maine School of Law and 14 years on the faculty of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, William S. Richardson School of Law. Dean Conway’s scholarly agenda and speeches have focused on, among other areas, advocating for public education and for actualizing the rights of marginalized groups and promoting systemic equity in legal education and the profession. Under her leadership, Penn State Dickinson Law’s Antiracist Development Institute (ADI) was created to facilitate the dismantling of structures that scaffold systemic racial inequality by using a systems design approach focused on implementing antiracist practices, processes, and policies throughout organizations.

Dean Conway is the current president of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). She is the co-recipient of the inaugural AALS Impact Award, which recognized her work in co-curating the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project, a webpage for law deans, faculty, staff, and the public that contains resources and information related to addressing systemic racism in law and legal education. Dean Conway is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a member of the AALS Executive Committee, a director of the AccessLex Institute, and a 27-year veteran of the United States Army, retiring in the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Dr. Andrea M. Matwyshyn serves as a Professor at Penn State Dickinson Law. She is also a professor in the engineering school at Penn State and is the founding faculty director of both the Penn State PILOT Lab (Policy Innovation Lab of Tomorrow), an interdisciplinary technology policy lab, and the Anuncia Donecia Songsong Manglona Lab for Gender and Economic Equity, a technology equity lab and clinic. She is also an affiliate scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and the Digital Law Group at Monash University.

Matwyshyn is an academic and author whose work focuses on the intersection of technology design, innovation policy, and law, particularly the role of information security/ cybersecurity, artificial intelligence/machine learning, health tech, consumer privacy, intellectual property, and technology competition.