Professor Aurora Plomer joined the University of Bristol Law School in August 2016 from the University of Sheffield where she was Director of the Sheffield Institute of Biotechnology, Law and Ethics. She was previously a Reader in Law at the University of Nottingham and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds. She graduated in Philosophy from the University of Lancaster (BA, MA, Ph.D.) and in Law at the University of  Manchester (LLB). 

Professor Plomer's latest project was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship  (MRF 2019 -112).  The aim of the project is to examine the history and rationale for the extension of property rights to companies in Article 1 of the First Protocol of the  European Convention on Human Rights (1950) and to review the Court's case law on intellectual property rights in this light. The outcome of the project is a monograph  Intellectual Property and the Human Rights of Companies in Europe  published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. 

In the spring of 2022, Professor Plomer was a visiting Senior Fellow at the School of Law of the London School of Economics in connection with the project.  Her research was published in the LSE Legal Studies working papers series in June 2022. You can read her paper here 'Trading Intellectual Property Rights in Europe: from IP Nationalism to International IP'. In 2023-2024 she was a Senior Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BICCL) where she was able to complete the research and writing of the CUP monograph. 

From 2016 to 2020 Professor Plomer was a collaborator on an international project funded by the Academy of Finland: 'Constitutional Hedges of Intellectual Property' led by Prof. Tuomas Mylly. The project addresses the ways in which IP, investment Treaties and fundamental rights fence IP protection in Europe. Her chapter 'A Market Friendly Paradigm for IP Rights and Human Rights in Europe' can be accessed in the open access collection edited by J. Griffiths & T. Mylly, Global Intellectual Property and the New Constitutionalism (OUP, 2022). 

In the last decade, Professor Plomer's research has focused on the interaction between intellectual property rights, human rights and innovation.  In 2014, she was a Senior Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence where she researched the history of patent harmonization in Europe leading to the creation of the Unified Patent Court. Professor Plomer's book  Patents, Human Rights and Access to Science (Edward Elgar, 2015) examines the historical and moral foundations of the right to access the benefits of science in international law and the implications for current debates on the monopolies created by patents in the life sciences. She has continued this line of research in a chapter 'IP Rights and Human Rights: What History tells us and why it matters' in an open access collection edited by  H. Porsdam & Porsdam Mann 'The Right to Science then and now (CUP, 2021). 

In September 2017, she was invited to take part in a high-level international meeting on Innovation for Sustainable Development organized by UNESCO and the Mexican state of Guanajuato. Her presentation on ‘Patents, Biotechnology and Global Justice’ drew on examples of R&D public-private partnerships in Europe to highlight the challenges in integrating the protection of fundamental human rights with IP rights. An expanded version of her presentation 'IP Right & Human Rights for Innovation and Sustainable Development has been published by UNESCO (2018). 

Professor Plomer's interest in the interface between IP and human rights was prompted by her collaboration on an international project funded by the European Commission on Exclusions to Embryonic Stem Cell Patents: European Law and Ethics in 2005-2006. The outcome of the project was a report published by the European Commission and an edited collection published by OUP in 2009. The project drew on Professor Plomer's previous research and publications on the law and ethics of medical research, international bioethics and human rights. 

Professor Plomer was a visiting fellow at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the  University of California at Berkeley, the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Stanford, the University of Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre and the American Society for the Advacement of Science in connection with the stem cell patents project. 

She was a member of the Euorpean Commission's ethics review panel for biomedical research in the  FP7 and 2020 programs. Her research has also been funded by UNESCO and the Council of Europe. 

International Intellectual Property Law, European Patent Law,  Human Rights,  Regulation of New Biotechnologies, Bioethics.