Our people
Meet the academics, researchers and members from the Centre
On this page:
Directors
Dr Alexandra Allen-Franks
Dr Alexandra Allen-Franks is a lecturer at Auckland Law School and a Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre of Intellectual Property, as well as a Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human Rights Law, Policy and Practice. She researches and teaches in intellectual property law (primarily trade marks), the law of evidence and human rights law. She is particularly interested in the intersection of these topics. Alex’s work has been published in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice, the European Intellectual Property Law Review and the Journal of Legal Studies. She is also a co-author of Mahoney on Evidence: Act and Analysis (2nd ed, Thomson Reuters, 2024).
Alex’s IP related practical experience comes from her time employed as a barrister by Andrew Brown KC where she worked exclusively on intellectual property cases. Matters included advising on issues of copyright infringement, trade mark registration and infringement, patent infringement, confidential information disputes, passing off allegations, fair trading matters, intellectual property licensing, intellectual property protection strategies, and legislative reform in relation to both copyright and plant variety rights. She has appeared in the High Court and Court of Appeal.
Alex has an LLM from the University of Cambridge . Her LLM thesis was on initial interest confusion in trade mark law, supervised by Professor Lionel Bently. She also holds a PhD from Cambridge on the ability of courts to exclude improperly obtained evidence in civil proceedings. The motivation for Alex’s PhD research came in part from her time working on intellectual property cases, where clients sometimes engage private investigators to get evidence of infringing acts.
Associate Professor Rob Batty
Rob is an Associate Professor and a Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre of Intellectual Property. His research interests include trade mark law and copyright and design law. Rob has written numerous articles on trade mark law, which have been published in international and New Zealand journals. His published articles have been cited in leading texts on trade mark law in New Zealand and Australia, by the New Zealand Supreme Court, the Singapore High Court and Court of Appeal, the New Zealand High Court and the New Zealand Intellectual Property Office. Rob is the co-author (with Kevin Glover) of the leading text on New Zealand trade mark law — Trade Marks in Practice (5th edition), published by LexisNexis. He is also an editor of the New Zealand Intellectual Property Journal.
Dr Joshua Yuvaraj
Joshua is a Senior Lecturer at Auckland Law School and a Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Intellectual Property. He obtained his PhD from Monash University in 2021, where he won the Mollie Holman Medal for the best law doctoral thesis.
Joshua’s research focuses on copyright, with a forthcoming monograph on author termination/reversion rights coauthored with Professor Rebecca Giblin (University of Melbourne) to be published by Cambridge University Press. His research has been published in leading journals like the Melbourne University Law Review and the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. Joshua’s work combines empirical, doctrinal and theoretical research methods to produce incisive, nuanced reflections on copyright law. His leading co-authored study into U.S. copyright termination notices was cited in a brief to the US Supreme Court.
Joshua’s current research focuses on creativity, copyright and emerging technologies, including generative artificial intelligence. More broadly, he writes on law and technology, with forthcoming chapters on Internet regulation and regulating unethical advertising in the gaming and cryptocurrency industries under contract law. Joshua is the Course Director of the undergraduate (Bachelor of Laws) and postgraduate (Master of Intellectual Property) Copyright and Design courses at Auckland Law School. He also teaches into the Contract Law and Privacy Law courses.
Members
Jayden Houghton
Jayden Houghton (Rereahu Maniapoto) is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Faculty of Law. He specialises in Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the protection of taonga Māori (such as waiata, haka and whakairo), including through intellectual property. Jayden’s research on these issues is published in leading domestic and international journals. Jayden is the author of Tikanga Māori: Cases and Materials (Thomson Reuters, Wellington, 2025), which explores case studies relevant to intellectual property, and an editor of Protecting Indigenous Knowledge: Perspectives from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press, Auckland, forthcoming).
Professor Tana Pistorius
Tana is a professor of Commercial Law and the Head of the Department of Commercial Law at the University of Auckland Business School. Tana is an affiliated member of the Z-inspection® initiative and a former president of ATRIP. Tana’s publications address issues in copyright and design law and information technology law. Her current IP research is on IP aspects of frontier technologies such as AI, the metaverse the intersection between IP and the data economy.
Professor Alex Sims
Alex is a Professor at the University of Auckland Business School. Alex’s IP research is particularly focused on copyright law, and she is a former President of the Asian Pacific Copyright Association. Alex’s IP research and publication also includes other areas of intellectual property law including trade mark law and patent law, as well as IP adjacent areas such as domain names. Her current IP research is on the copyrightability of images created through generative AI models using text to image.
Dr Bram Van Wiele
Bram Van Wiele is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School and a research associate at the Intellectual Property Unit at the University of Cape Town. He is the Deputy Editor of New Zealand Business Law Quarterly (NZBLQ) and the Treasurer of the Asian Pacific Copyright Association (APCA). His current research focuses on industrial copyright in the digital age and the use of certification trade marks.
Nae Win Aung
Nae, a Commercial Law PhD student at the University of Auckland, specialises in researching the intellectual property regulatory system and the data economy under the supervision of Professor Tana Pistorius, Associate Professor Rob Batty, and Dr Bram Van Wiele. Recognised in IAM Strategy 300 as one of the world's leading IP strategists, Nae brings a decade of experience from the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, where he served as a patent examiner and Assistant Director for enterprise development. Nae is dedicated to contributing to developing New Zealand's IP regulatory system through his doctoral research.
Associate Members
Jennifer Campion
My research interests are in property law, especially land law and intellectual property law, and extend to energy, climate and natural resources law. I am particularly interested in copyright law and I am the University of Waikato Copyright Officer and the Waikato member of Universities New Zealand’s Copyright Experts Working Group. In 2023, I was appointed a member of the New Zealand Copyright Tribunal.
Dr David J Jefferson
Dr David J Jefferson (he/him) is an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury Faculty of Law, where he teaches Environmental Law, Land Law, and Intellectual Property. David is a legal anthropologist whose research covers a range of issues related to biodiversity conservation, biotechnology regulation, intellectual property in the agricultural and food sectors, ecosystem rights laws, and the protection of Indigenous knowledge systems. The field sites where David works are in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the Andean Community of South America. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Queensland, a JD from the University of California, Davis, and an MA in Psychology from Suffolk University. David has been the recipient of several competitive research awards, including a United States Fulbright fellowship for work in Ecuador. His first book, Towards an Ecological Intellectual Property: Reconfiguring Relationships Between People and Plants in Ecuador was published in 2020.
Professor Jessica Lai
Jessica Lai is Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in patent law, the protection of Mātauranga Māori, and patents and gender. Jessica is the author of Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Property Rights (Springer, 2014) and Patent Law and Women: Tackling Gender Bias in Knowledge Governance (Routledge, 2021), as well as Patent Law and Policy (LexisNexis, 2016, with Susy Frankel). She is also an author of the Annotated High Court Rules (4th edn, LexisNexis, 2018), as well as numerous articles and chapters, and the editor of multiple books. Her latest edited collection is A Research Agenda for Intellectual Property Law and Gender (Edward Elgar, 2024, with Kathy Bowrey).