Jacob Golan’s practice focuses on obtaining intellectual property protection and providing counsel to clients in the biotechnology, agrotechnology, and medical device and therapeutics fields. He assists clients with worldwide patent prosecution, portfolio development and management, patentability and infringement analysis, due diligence, trademark and brand protection, and related counseling.
Jacob represents clients in a wide range of areas including biopolymers, immunotherapies, plant varieties, transgenic organisms, medical devices and compositions, and sequencing platforms. Jacob is also involved in various pro bono efforts related to Indigenous Peoples’ rights in the context of intellectual property, counseling communities on protecting their genetic resources and digital sequence information (DSI).
Jacob earned his B.S., cum laude, in Biology and Geology from Duke University, where he received The Excellence in Plant Science Prize; and his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where, as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, he researched genome evolution and the biophysics of microbial disease spread. Jacob went on to earn his J.D. from New York University School of Law, serving as editor-in-chief for the Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law. Before joining Myers Bigel, Jacob was an Associate at Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear, and a Patent Scientist for the USDA Forest Service and APHIS.
Jacob has authored several legal publications, including “Intellectual Property Rights and Ethnobiology: An Update on Posey’s Call to Action” (Journal of Ethnobiology, 2019); “Benefit sharing: Why inclusive provenance metadata matter” (Frontiers in Genetics, 2022); and “The Food Microbiome as Traditional Knowledge” (NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law, 2022). His scientific research also has been published in academic journals, including PNAS, Nature Communications, G3, New Phytologist, among others.
Jacob is admitted to the State Bar of California. He is not licensed in North Carolina.