F. Scott Kieff, primary investigator: Kieff is a professor at the George Washington University School of Law in Washington, DC, and the Ray and Louise Knowles Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he directs the Project on Commercializing Innovation. His research interests generally involve the interface among technology, law, and economics, with a focus on the problems facing technology development, entrepreneurship, and innovation.  He also focuses on ADR and structuring transactions to avoid and resolve disputes and was appointed to serve on the newly created panel of mediators for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Kieff practiced law for over six years as a trial lawyer and patent lawyer for Pennie & Edmonds in New York and Jenner & Block in Chicago, where he was promoted early to the rank of Counsel, and served as law clerk to U.S. Circuit Judge Giles S. Rich.  Kieff has also served on the faculties at the Northwestern University School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, Stanford Law School, and the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, and as a faculty fellow at Harvard Law School.  He has published numerous articles and delivered numerous speeches about obtaining and enforcing intellectual property rights, edited the book Perspectives on Properties of the Human Genome Project (2003), and co-authored the popular treatise and casebook Principles of Patent Law (2011), now in its fifth edition, which is used at many top law schools, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago. 

Stephen H. Haber, co-investigator: Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, where he holds appointments in the departments of political science and history.  In addition, he is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development.  Further, Haber serves as Director of Stanford’s Social Science History Institute.  Haber consults regularly for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and is a Research Economist of the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Haber’s current research focuses on the interaction of political and economic institutions, with a particular emphasis on the institutions that govern banking systems and financial markets.  Recent publications include: The Politics of Property Rights (with Armando Razo and Noel Maurer, Cambridge University Press, 2003); “Mexico’s Experiments with Bank Privatization and Liberalization,” 29 Journal of Banking and Finance 2325 (2005); and “The Political Economy of Latin American Industrialization,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America (2005).  Haber serves as Director of Stanford’s Institute for Research in Social Sciences (IRiSS) Program on Governance and Institutions.