Professor Kathleen Liddell

Kathy Liddell is the Director of the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences (LML), and the Herschel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property and Medical Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on innovations in health, medicine and society, with the aim of understanding and improving the legal frameworks that govern and support these fields. Professor Liddell has been the principal investigator for several large projects on intellectual property and information law, including in relation to genomics, precision medicine, AI in healthcare, repurposing pharmaceuticals, and antimicrobial resistance. She is also a Steering Committee member of Cambridge Reproduction.

In addition to research, Professor Liddell lectures regularly on her specialist topics and offers executive teaching on various issues including emerging health technologies, regulation of medicine and medical innovation, and core ethical and legal principles.

Professor Liddell has worked on policy reports for national health departments, national ethical advisory commissions, and the European Commission. Her expertise extends to other areas of life sciences including national and international regulation of clinical trials, medical negligence, biomaterials (including human tissue, cells, organs), pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, and personalised and regenerative medicine.

She studied law and natural sciences at the University of Melbourne before undertaking her doctorate in law at the University of Oxford and a Masters of Bioethics at Monash University. In addition to academia, Professor Liddell has worked in private legal practice and in the civil service. She is connected to experts across the world including, for example, in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Hong Kong, and Qatar.