Bhaven Sampat

Bhaven Sampat is an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He also holds a courtesy affiliation with the University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where he teaches in the MPA and MIA programs. Sampat also teaches in the Sustainable Development Ph.D. program at the Earth Institute.

An economist by training, Sampat is centrally interested in issues at the intersection of health policy and innovation policy. His current work examines the causes and consequences of generic firms’ challenges to pharmaceutical patents in the U.S., the impact of pharmaceutical patent laws on innovation and access to medicines in the developing countries, the political economy of the National Institutes of Health, and the returns to publicly funded medical research. Sampat has written extensively on the effects of university patenting and the Bayh-Dole Act on academic medicine, and on patent quality issues in the U.S. He continues to be actively involved in policy debates related to these issues.

Sampat has published broadly in economics, law, business, health policy, medical, and life science journals, including past or forthcoming articles in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the International Journal of Industrial Organization, the Emory Law Journal, the North Carolina Law Review, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Public Health, among many others.

Sampat co-created the first free, searchable patent database in India. He was the principal organizer of the [email protected] conference, which was held at Columbia and examined the effects of new global patent laws on developing countries. His work has been funded through grants and prizes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Merck Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund.

Sampat received his B.A., M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in economics from Columbia. He was previously an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech, where he won the “Faculty Member of the Year” award for both the 2001–2002 and 2002–2003 academic years. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan.