Career series: Lisa Larrimore Ouellette

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, a professor at Stanford Law School, tells WIPR about her research on COVID-19 and her debt of gratitude to an inspiring female mentor.

Tell us about the course of your career.

I thought I wanted to be a research physicist, but in the final year of my PhD at Cornell University, I realised that the research questions I had focused on weren’t the kind of problems I wanted to study for the rest of my career.

I had always been interested in bigger-picture questions of science policy, and I read an article about patent law that inspired me to go to law school. My first exposure to legal scholarship and research came during a seminar in my first year at Yale Law School, and I loved it.