Deputy Director General |
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Francis Gurry, a national of Australia, is Deputy Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. He is responsible for WIPOs activities in the area of patents, which include patent policy questions and the administration of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), under which some 110,000 international patent applications were filed in 2003; biotechnology and genetic resource policy questions; traditional knowledge; and the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, which has administered over 20,000 disputes over Internet domain names since 2000.
Dr. Gurry holds law degrees from the University of Melbourne and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is a Vice President of the International Federation of Commercial Arbitration Institutions (IFCAI).
Before joining WIPO in 1985, he practiced as an attorney in Melbourne and Sydney and also taught law at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of a textbook on the law of trade secrets and confidential information, entitled Breach of Confidence, published by Oxford University Press in the United Kingdom in 1984, and co-author, with Frederick Abbott and Thomas Cottier, of The International Intellectual Property System: Commentary and Materials, published by Kluwer in July 1999.