Speaker Biographies

On March 22, 2004 , President George W. Bush nominated Jon W. Dudas to be Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Mr. Dudas has been the Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Acting Director of the USPTO since January 12, 2004 . He assumed the post under the succession provisions of the 1999 American Inventors Protection Act. Dudas comes to the job with over a decade of experience in intellectual property law and management.
As a private practitioner in the early 1990s, Dudas had a significant intellectual property practice that included extensive trademark and copyright work. During his six years as Counsel to the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, and Staff Director and Deputy General Counsel for the House Committee on the Judiciary--the birthplace of all federal intellectual property statutory law--he guided enactment of major patent, trademark and copyright policy, including the most sweeping revisions to American patent law since 1952, the 1999 American Inventors Protection Act, and the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law implementing two landmark international treaties protecting creative works in the digital age. Dudas was also instrumental in the passage of the 1996 Trademark Anti-Counterfeiting Consumer Protection Act, a law making it more difficult for seized counterfeit merchandise to re-enter the consumer marketplace.

On January 11, 2002, Dudas was appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO on January 11, 2002. During his two-years as USPTO’s Deputy Under Secretary and Director, Jon Dudas was directly involved in guiding the operations of the $1.2 billion, 7,000-employee agency and was pivotal in the creation of the USPTO’s 21st Century Strategic Plan. Under Dudas’ leadership, quality will continue to be the USPTO mantra. Current and prospective patent examiners and managers, as well patent attorneys and agents, will be tested to ensure they have the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities to produce top quality examination results. Quality assurance tools will be used throughout the patent and trademark examination process. And, as a final administrative guarantee of patent quality, a more sophisticated post grant review of patents will be implemented.

Completing the agency’s transition to e-government is another Dudas priority. By year’s end the complete trademark process, including foreign trademark filings under the Madrid Protocol, will be automated. Today, over 65% of trademark applications are filed electronically, and trademark customers can electronically determine the status of pending trademarks, do a preliminary pre-filing search, access general information and obtain weekly information on published marks. Patent applications are now available to the public on line, offering valuable early notice of the state-of-the art in technology. The Image File Wrapper (IFW), USPTO’s official patent application record in electronic format, is operational and is effectively supplanting the outdated and inefficient 200-year-old paper-based system. More than 350,000 applications have been scanned into the system, and 1800 patent examiners are now using IFW exclusively.

Dudas continues to work with members of Congress to enact the Administration’s funding proposal supporting the strategic plan. Enactment of the new fee schedule is critical to the success of the plan and approval is expected soon after Congress returns.

Promoting American commerce abroad by harmonizing patent and trademark administration and policy is also high among the Dudas priorities. During the Bush years, the USPTO has become a major force in the global economy, receiving broad support of the international IP community for its strategic plan. Jon Dudas will continue to work internationally on agreements to eliminate costly duplication of effort in processing patents and trademarks, and to further a more harmonized, quality-based intellectual property system.

Mr. Dudas holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance, summa cum laude, from the University of Illinois and a law degree from the University of Chicago, with honors. He is a member of the Illinois State Bar and the Bar of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and their four children.

Dr. Peter C. Schultz
Former scientist at Corning, Inc.
Co-developer of the world’s first practical glass optical fiber for communications

Peter C. Schultz, Ph.D., is retired President (1988 to 2001) of Heraeus Tenevo Inc., a $200 million technical glass manufacturer specializing in fiber optics and semiconductor markets, and retired Chief Technical Officer North America for Heraeus Holding GmbH (the $6 billion German parent company). Since 2001 he has provided consulting services to several companies through Peter Schultz Consulting, LLC. He serves as senior advisor and Board member of OFS (the Lucent fiber optics business unit acquired by Furukawa in 2001). He is also Chairman of a start-up company (BioSensor Inc., founded in 1997) developing a non-invasive fiber optic sensor to measure blood glucose for diabetics, based on Russian technology.

Following graduation from Rutgers University (BS 1964, Ph.D. 1967), he co-developed the world’s first practical glass optical fiber for communications in 1970 as a scientist at Corning, Inc. He is co-inventor of the fiber optics now used worldwide for telecommunications. In 1993 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and in 2000 received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton for this accomplishment. Until 1984 he managed glass materials research at Corning, Inc., after which he attended MIT Sloan Business School.
Peter Schultz holds 26 patents, has written over 20 research papers and is an expert in fused silica glasses. He is the recipient of numerous other awards including the International Glass Science Award (1977), SPIE Technology Achievement Award (1981), ASM Engineering Materials Achievement Award (1983), First American Innovators Award (US Dept. of Commerce 1995), Rutgers University Distinguished Alumni (2000), the Czech Gold Medal for Achievement (President Havel 2002), Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2001). He has taught at Cornell University (Visiting Professor Materials Science 1978-1984), George Washington University (Continuing Engineering Program Professor 1976-1994) and University of Virginia (Visiting Professor of

Darden School 1988-present). He has extensive legal experience as an expert witness in patent defense.
He was born in 1942 in Brooklyn, NY to a Czech-American mother and German-American father. He and his wife Mary Anne live in Essex, NY and St. Thomas, USVI. They have four grown children and four grandchildren.

Nick Taylor
President, The Author’s Guild

Nick Taylor is a best-selling author, the President of the Authors Guild, the oldest and largest organization of published writers in the United States, and an advocate of copyright and fair contracts. In addition, he is a director of the Authors Guild Foundation and a member of the literary organization PEN.

Mr. Taylor has written or collaborated on nine non-fiction books on a variety of topics. Most recently, he wrote Laser: The Inventor, the Nobel Laureate, and the Thirty-year Patent War. Originally published by Simon and Schuster, the Citadel Press paperback appeared in the summer of 2003. Laser is the story of inventor Gordon Gould's long struggle to win credit for his role in the invention of the laser.

Previously, Mr. Taylor collaborated with John Glenn, astronaut and former senator, on his best-selling 1999 autobiography, John Glenn: A Memoir. Other collaborations include In Hitler's Shadow, a story he co-authored with Yaron Svoray about an Israeli's bizarre journey into the German neo-Nazi underground. It was released as the HBO feature movie The Infiltrator, starring Oliver Platt and featuring Alan King and Peter Riegert.
Mr. Taylor also collaborated with one of Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital's best-known oncologists, Dr. Sidney J. Winawer, on Healing Lessons. It is the story of his wife's struggle with cancer and his transformation from a traditional doctor to one who embraced other forms of healing. Mr. Taylor’s research, and Dr. Winawer's example provided convincing evidence of the link between mind and body that is increasingly a part of effective medicine today.

Mr. Taylor’s favorite work, however, is A Necessary End. It is the closest to his heart as it is his memoir about his growing involvement in his parents' lives in their final years. TheWashington Post called it "one of the key stories of our time." Mr. Taylor says, “Every middle-aged child with older parents has a similar story to tell, and I believe each of us dreads the moment when we have to become parents to our parents. They don't like it, either, and resist every step of the way. As I, assisted by my wife Barbara, assisted my parents through the adventures and trials of their final years, I found humor and joy along with the sadness.”  Other books, such as Ordinary Miracles and Bass Wars have observed life in a small church and the lives of touring professional fishermen, respectively. Bass Wars is still the best book yet written about life on the pro bass fishing circuit.

His current project is a history of the Works Progress Administration.  The research is daunting requiring the use of an enormous number of files in the National Archives, the Roosevelt Library, state archives, and also the interviewing of a dwindling number of actual participants, all of whom are in their late eighties and older. It is, however, a period of American history that Mr. Taylor has found to be fascinating.  Prior to writing books, Nick Taylor wrote innumerable articles that appeared in magazines including New York, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New Yorker, and on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.
He has lectured and taught at the Sandhills Writers' Conference at Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia, and the annual Writers' Conferences at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. He has been interviewed by television personalities such as Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Larry King, and Geraldo Rivera, and by several radio personalities as well.

Mr. Taylor is a native of North Carolina and has resided in New York City since 1984 with his wife, television reporter Barbara Nevins Taylor.