S. Sean Tu, PhD, JD

Sean Tu is a research collaborator with PORTAL and Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, where he is a nationally recognized expert on patent law and drug law. He is also a Scholar at Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. A prolific scholar with over fifty publications, his work has appeared in top journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature Biotechnology, and Stanford Technology Law Review, among others.

Tu has co-authored several amicus briefs, one of which was cited by the US Supreme Court, and is co-author of casebooks on biotechnology and intellectual property law. The National Institutes of Health Care Management awarded him a grant to study the intersection between patent law and drug pricing. In 2021–2022, he was a visiting professor at Harvard Medical School. He has also worked as an expert witness in patent law cases, helped start a company focused on patent prosecution analytics, and co-founded a small biotechnology company focused on cancer cell biology.

Tu holds degrees in chemistry and microbiology from the University of Florida and a JD from the University of Chicago, where he was a research assistant for Judge Richard Posner. He received his doctorate in pharmacology from Cornell University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology. Prior to joining the University of Alabama, he was a faculty member at the West Virginia University College of Law, where he served two years as Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development. Before his academic appointments, he was an associate at Foley & Lardner LLP, where he prosecuted pharmaceutical patents.