Jessica Lai

Jessica Christine Lai is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in the interaction of intellectual property rights and indigenous knowledge.

Academic career
Lai is trained as a chemist, having completed a Master of Science in 2009 in chemistry with a thesis titled The Use of Nanostructured Calcium Silicate in Solar Cells at the Victoria University of Wellington. Lai completed her Doctor of Law in 2013 at the University of Lucerne, where she also conducted postdoctoral research. Lai was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Max-Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich. Lai then returned to New Zealand to join the faculty of the School of Accounting and Commercial Law at Victoria University of Wellington, rising to full professor.

Lai's research focuses on the interaction between Western intellectual property systems and indigenous knowledge, specifically Mātauranga Māori. She has investigated how the patenting system addresses problematic technologies such as a gene-related technology, and also examines law and feminism, knowledge theorisation and legal sociology. Lai has written publicly about issues such as country of origin labelling, the difference between a trade mark and a certification mark in regards to the 'Rainbow tick', and differences between men and women in STEM.

In 2018 Lai and colleague Susie Frankel were awarded a Marsden grant on "Mission Creep” in the Pharmaceutical Industry and its Impact on Innovation and Health. In 2021, Lai was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship for a project titled Patents and power: a critical analysis of knowledge governance.