Role: PhD Student, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

  Contact: cmm206@student.bham.ac.uk

  Research Interests:
Intellectual Property Rights | Health Inequalities | Decolonization of IP Regimes | Access to Medicines | Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS)

Chinwe Mary Joe Maduabum (“Mary Joe”) is a PhD student in the Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. In addition to conducting doctoral studies in law, Mary Joe is an Assistant Director with over fifteen years of working experience in the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Nigeria’s independent national regulatory authority for telecommunications. She led the Post Licensing Unit of Licensing & Authorisation Department; the Academia Research Support Unit of the Research and Development; as well as the Emerging Technologies Research Unit of Research and Development and is currently providing leadership in the Risk Management Unit of NCC’s Corporate Planning, Strategy and Risk Management Department. Her passion for telecommunications and the desire to learn how best to regulate the sector propelled her to enroll in LLM in Information Technology and Telecommunications Law at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow where she graduated with distinction.

Mary Joe successfully passed her PhD progress review panel at the University of Birmingham in April 2023. Shortly thereafter, she was awarded the prestigious (UK) Turing mobility scholarship to pursue critical doctoral archival work at the Feminist and Legal Theory Project at Emory Law.

Mary Joe’s doctoral work examines Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) with a particular focus on patents under the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), access to medicines, decolonisation of IP regimes and health inequalities.

She seeks to make an original contribution on how TRIPS’ international patent rights could be re-imagined to reflect the realities in the Global South, promote global welfare and ensure health equality. In doing so, this research will explore the concept of social justice through a feminist legal theory lens to analyze whether and to what extent the patent requirements introduced by TRIPS represent an injustice to the Global South. Adopting socio-legal and inter-disciplinary methodology, this research will also critically analyze the controversy, issues and debates surrounding Covid-19 vaccine patents, as well as the implications of patent waivers to ascertain whether TRIPS is an impediment to achieving global health equality.