Professor Osmat Azzam Jefferson

Biography

I am interested in the power of making informative decisions to solve problems and the accessibility and use of the know-how capabilities by all to do so.  Currently my projects involve developing tools to track and map gene patents, a highly debated topic across many societies, and assessing scientific research influence on invention and innovation. I started my career working with UNESCO researchers in Lebanon on measuring rural women's economic contribution to the household.  We mapped the internal decision making processes on key family issues and conducted field studies across rural communities.  Being in a war zone, I also used play therapy techniques to evaluate the impact of war on children and their livelihoods.   These imperative experiences made me seek science-enabled tools to solve societal problems. Throughout the past thirty or so years of my professional life, I researched applied problems in the field and in the labs of various countries, developed diagnostic tools for different plant diseases and helped establishing diagnostic facilities in national and international labs.   Post my graduate studies at Cornell University, post-doctorate research at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and since I completed a master degree in International Law at Australian National University, my thinking in science has broadened substantially.  Coming from an applied agriculture perspective, I became more intrigued in the dynamic nature of innovation within an ecosystem and the interesting local and global interactions between scientific information, intellectual property,  and societal changes.  In 2005, I joined Cambia, a social enterprise in Canberra, Australia to explore novel tools and policy approaches that can nudge social change.  And in 2009, Cambia and QUT joined forces to launch the Lens project, an expanded version of Patent Lens, and scale it up as an open platform for discovery, metrics and analysis of global patents and scholarly works and their relationships with the help of other partners such as NIH, Crossref, and now Microsoft Academic.  Thus, as a QUT research professor seconded to Cambia, I lead the development of applications of the Lens project, and from time to time dabble in research on justice system at international organization, or citizenship issues and employment rights in the international workplace.