Bahrad Sokhansanj

Bahrad Sokhansanj is a Senior Research Scholar at LawAI, where his work focuses on U.S. law and policy for AI governance, with emphasis on AI systems that interact with biological data or biological design capabilities, AI-biosecurity, and intellectual property issues arising in AI safety and regulatory regimes. Before joining LawAI, Bahrad practiced as an intellectual property litigator and clerked for Chief Judge Sharon Prost on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Prior to his legal career, he was a Graduate and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and later an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Drexel University, where he led a computational systems-biology research group. Bahrad holds a PhD in computational biophysics and a JD from Columbia Law School, and his recent scholarship includes work on genome language-model governance and the challenges posed by decentralized and locally run AI systems.