Bhaven Sampat, PhD, is an assistant professor at Columbia University, with appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management (at the Mailman School of Public Health) and the International Center for Health Outcomes and Innovation Research (in the Department of Surgery, Columbia University Medical Center). Dr. Sampat is an economist by training, centrally interested in issues at the intersection of health policy and innovation policy. His current projects examine the political economy of the National Institutes of Health, the effects of patents on access to medicines in developing countries, the interactions between patent laws and FDA regulation in the pharmaceutical industry, and issues related to patent quality.  He has also written extensively on the effects of university patenting and "entrepreneurship" on academic medicine and technology transfer, and is actively involved in policy debates related to these issues. Together with Patrick Crosby, Sampat developed india.bigpatents.org, a free searchable database of Indian patents and applications.