Our Team
Connie Cheng, PhD | Partner
Connie partners with technology clients to develop comprehensive strategies to protect their intellectual property. Her practice focuses on patent prosecution, global portfolio management, and strategic counseling on patentability, freedom to operate, and patent due diligence matters.
Connie leverages her broad technical background to prepare and prosecute patent applications across a diverse range of technologies. She has worked extensively with medical device and healthcare technologies, including implantable devices, neurostimulation systems, orthodontic appliances, surgical instrumentation, wearable sensors, ablation systems, ophthalmologic devices, medical imaging, diagnostics, digital health, and artificial intelligence-based platforms. She also has significant experience with biotechnology, materials science, autonomous vehicles, semiconductor manufacturing, and software.
Before joining Fortem IP, Connie was a patent attorney at Perkins Coie and a patent agent at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati. Prior to her legal career, she earned a doctorate degree in Bioengineering from the University of Washington. Her dissertation focused on developing pH-responsive polymers for delivering mRNA vaccines. Connie also conducted undergraduate research at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in biomaterials, intracellular signaling, and synthetic biology.
EDUCATION
BS Engineering Sciences, Harvard University
PhD Bioengineering, University of Washington
JD, University of Washington School of Law
BAR ADMISSIONS
Washington
United States Patent and Trademark Office
PUBLICATIONS
Co-author, Multifunctional triblock copolymers for intracellular messenger RNA delivery, Biomaterials 2012, 33, 6868-6876.
Co-author, Diblock copolymers with tunable pH transitions for gene delivery, Biomaterials 2012, 33, 2301-2309.
Co-author, Surface functionalization of living cells with multilayer patches, Nano Lett. 2008, 8, 4446-4453.
Co-author, An inducible autocrine cascade regulates rat hepatocyte proliferation and apoptosis response to tumor necrosis factor-α, Hepatology, 2008, 2048, 276-288.