Biography
Originally from the mountains of Lebanon, Osmat holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Plant sciences and a master’s degree in International Law from the Australian National University. She also has more than a decade of experience in the fields of plant disease management and crop improvement, mainly in Latin America and Asia. Osmat joined Cambia in 2005 as a scientist, and since 2009 she has also held dual appointments with QUT’s Faculty of Science and Engineering and Faculty of Law.
Her research interests cover dynamic changes in complex adaptive systems, mainly the biological innovation systems. She has developed open public resources that foster cooperation, equal access to IP information, and transparency metrics in biological innovation systems and collaborated with other open and public institutes to render such information accessible and usable. At Cambia, she currently leads the patent citations and biologicals projects that oversee the development of various public tools. The patent citations work is about to release a new application, PatCite, that enables the navigation of the integrated patents and scholarly work’s knowledge. The already established patent sequence (PatSeq) facility links diverse patent-derived attributes with genetic sequence information and provide the public with navigation capabilities at various levels to collect signals on what is subject for patenting and what is not, to explore patenting patterns across genomes and at the same time zoom in to compare patent claims (see her article in Nature Biotech at http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n12/full/nbt.2755.html).