Becky Kaufman is a partner with King & Spalding’s Intellectual Property Practice Group. Her practice includes U.S. and international patent prosecution, client counseling and transactional due diligence in the life sciences area. She also handles licensing, strategic collaborations and other corporate transactions involving intellectual property. Ms. Kaufman represents life sciences companies, both private and public, investors and research organizations. She regularly counsels emerging life sciences companies on strategies for developing patent portfolios to protect commercial products.
Before joining the firm, Ms. Kaufman was a principal with Cordova Ventures, an early stage life sciences fund, where she worked closely with Cordova’s portfolio companies on patent and business matters. Prior to that, she worked for the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Advanced Technology Development Center, where she was involved in the formation of the joint Georgia Tech/Emory University biotechnology incubator, EmTech Bio.
Ms. Kaufman is active in the Southeastern life sciences community. She is a member of the Executive Committee of Southeast BIO(SEBIO), a non-profit organization devoted to the growth of the regional life sciences economy, as well as the immediate past Chairman. SEBIO’s forty five member Board of Directors is broadly representative of the region’s venture capital, entrepreneurial and technology transfer community. Ms. Kaufman has twice served as Chairman of the SEBIO Investor Forum, the region’s premier life sciences venture capital conference. She is a member of the Biotechnology Advisory Committee for the Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator at the University of Florida as well as the Advisory Board for the Emerging Leaders Network (ELN) of Georgia BIO. She is a frequent speaker at industry meetings and has written numerous articles, including many focused on the life sciences industry in the Southeast. Ms. Kaufman was recently named to Tech Journal South’s list of the 25 most influential people in the Southeast technology and business world. She is currently serving as the Co-Chair of the Program Committee for the 2009 BIO International Convention.
Ms. Kaufman received a B.S. degree in Biology, with honors, from Wake Forest University in 1991. She received her J.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1994. After graduating from law school, she spent more than two years working on a Ph.D. in molecular biology, first at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and later, at the George Washington University School of Medicine.
