Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan is Chairperson of the Research Ethics Committee of University of Galway where she specialises in industrial and intellectual property law, animal rights and legal issues related to veganism and vegetarianism. Maureen is introducing an undergraduate module called "Animal Law" next year (2023-2024) and this will be the first UG module on animal law in a School of Law in Ireland. She is also introducing a PG course for the LLM students and this will also be open to Masters students in the School of Sociology and Political Science. She completed a Ph.D. at the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh in 2017 where her doctoral studies focused on patent system reform in the area of biotechnological inventions and morality, using devices of participatory budgeting from Brazil. She published a monograph entitled “Biotechnology, Patents and Morality: A Deliberative and Participatory Paradigm for Reform” with Routledge in 2019. She has published on patenting human-animal hybrids and chimeras in the Journal of Animal Ethics and is the author of a major article on artistic copyright law, published in the Intellectual Property Quarterly in 2015. She has also published widely in the area of in free/open source and creative commons licensing in both Spanish (Libro Blanco de Software Libre en España II) and English. She holds a Research LL.M. from the University of Warwick and studied her B.C.L. and B.A. (Philosophy and English) at University College Cork. She previously taught at the University of the West of England, Bristol and at Warwick University. Maureen was Chairperson of the Vegetarian Society of Ireland from 2013–9, secretary from 2012–2013 and has been a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics since 2014. She became vegetarian at the age of 12 and vegan at 20. Recently she has published articles on vegetarian and vegan rights in the European Human Rights Law Review and also in the Revista de Derecho Animal which is the journal of the Animal Law Masters at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She continues to research and write on many of these areas.
