Director, Advisor - Intellectual Property
Ms. Evita Grant is the CEO of TecHustle, a company that aims to develop technologies that digitize Africa’s informal sector. Its flagship product is AFI – a mobile-based financial platform for African small businesses to send and receive payments globally. Evita was formerly a lawyer in the Palo Alto office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she was a member of the patents and innovations practice. Her practice included intellectual property development, counseling, and monetization for clients in the life sciences, biotechnology, clean energy, and high-tech industries.
Ms. Evita has consulted the Brazilian government’s Institute of Applied Economic Research, where she researched legal and non-legal policies that support technology transfer from academic institutions to private markets in the U.S. and Brazil and formulated governmental policy recommendations on legal reforms and non-legal infrastructure critical to support and expand local biotechnology industries in emerging markets.
Ms. Evita also authored the first article ever published in the Food and Drug Law Journal relating to FDA regulation of CRISPR gene-editing technology. Chinese-based publishing group, Angle Publishing requested publishing rights to publish an article in Chinese for the entire Greater China region.
Moreover, Ms. Evita helped establish an exemption to the Anti-Circumvention Rule of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows independent researchers to access the information necessary to evaluate the safety, security, and effectiveness of medical devices.
Ms. Evita is a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BSc in Chemical Engineering) and Harvard University (Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences and JD in Law)