Schott, P.C. Jeffrey E. Depp

Jeff is a registered patent attorney and an intellectual property and innovation policy professional with a unique combination of formal training and real-world experience.

Jeff has many years of technology commercialization experience including serving as a Technology Commercialization Manager at the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute.  In this role, he served simultaneously as an alliance, project and licensing manager.  He was responsible for the assessment of life science and healthcare information technologies, their intellectual property protection and their further development and licensing. He is conversant in technologies ranging from immuno-oncology and antibody therapeutics to AI-driven predictive diagnostics and NLP.

Before joining the Innovation Institute, he spent time working for a federal district court judge focused primarily on intellectual property and intellectual property litigation.  Before that, he spent over twenty-five (25) years in the pharmaceutical industry.  There he performed various roles in manufacturing, sales and marketing, and business and advocate development at some of the country’s top academic medical centers.

Jeff also does intellectual property and innovation policy work for think tanks, trade organizations, professional societies and other organizations.  He is currently a PhD candidate in Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA).  His dissertation consists of an analysis of the current state of U.S. innovation from an Austrian economics perspective.  His broader research interests include innovation policy at the intersection of economics, intellectual property (IP) law and antitrust law.  In addition, he is a Thomas Edison Innovation Law and Policy Fellow at the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy (C-IP²) in the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

Jeff has a bachelor’s degree chemical and biomedical engineering with concentrations in molecular biology and fermentation technology and from Carnegie Mellon.  He also has a master’s degree in industrial administration (business) from Carnegie Mellon where he concentrated on international management, marketing and finance.  He earned his law degree from the Duquesne University School of Law with a focus on intellectual property law.