Posted by The Law School
18 October 2024The University of Exeter Law School is delighted to share that Dr Louise Loder, Lecturer in Law and Director of Skills, Prizes & Scholarships, was awarded the Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network (GlobalWIIN) Special Recognition Award at a Conference, Showcase & Gala Awards Ceremony held on 3 October 2024 in London. The Special Recognition Award is for ‘IP & Sustainability: Embedding sustainability, social justice and human rights in IP teaching practice, scholarship and advocacy’.
The GlobalWIIN programme aims to promote and raise awareness of the social and economic empowerment of women with a focus on fast-tracking skills development, knowledge transfer and exploitation of women-led IP and innovation. The programme attracted significant participation from women inventors, business leaders and academics from across Asia, Africa, Europe, Middle East, North America, and the Caribbean. As GlobalWIIN notes: ‘GlobalWIIN Special Recognition awardees are creative, inventive, innovative entrepreneurs, leaders, scientists, engineers, technologists, designers and academics from all sectors and backgrounds right across the globe. The awardees are very different, but they all have this in common: tenacity, determination, commitment, extraordinary potential, border-breaking influence, and the ability to improve our futures and the quality of our lives.’
Much of Louise’s IP teaching practice is focused on the human-centred dimensions of intellectual property that are not typically featured in IP university modules – specifically, the human rights implications and the interconnectedness between various IP rights and the Sustainable Development Goals. Beyond embedding human rights and sustainability into her teaching more broadly, she has contributed to Exeter Law School’s leadership in IP and sustainability by authoring and project managing a report for IPAN earlier this year which addressed the following question: ‘How does IP intersect with each of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and how might IP be used to advance innovation and creativity towards realising the Goals?’. The report, which was published by IPAN on World Intellectual Property Day 2024 featuring forewords from the Intellectual Property Office and the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, explores how developments in intellectual property in the future can have sustainability at their core from the outset and not as an afterthought. The report is available for download here.
Louise joined the University of Exeter Law School in 2021 and completed both her LLM and PhD at the University after a 20-year career in corporate and NGO communications, programming and stakeholder engagement. In the Law School, she is the Director of Skills, Prizes and Scholarships, and the Programme Director of the LLM (Master of Laws). Louise convenes the Legal Foundations module in the Law School, teaches Legal Research & Writing Skills on the LLM programme, and teaches Intellectual Property Law at undergraduate level. Outside of the Law School, she is a member of the Secretariat of the Intellectual Property Awareness Network (IPAN), and an Executive Committee member of the Human Rights Lawyers Association and the Association of Law Teachers.