Dr James Scheibner
Dr James Scheibner holds an undergraduate background in computing and law from the University of Tasmania, followed by a PhD at the Centre of Law and Genetics under the supervision of Professor Dianne Nicol, Associate Professor Jane Nielsen, and Associate Professor Michael Charleston. His doctoral research examined the interplay between informal norms and formal intellectual property rights in the development of open source bioinformatics tools.
Following his PhD, Dr Scheibner completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the Health Ethics and Policy Laboratory in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich. Collaborating with the Laboratory for Data Security and the Lausanne University Hospital, he played a key role in the Data Protection and Personalised Health Project, conducting ethical and legal assessments to develop privacy-enhancing tools for distributed queries on medical data.
Dr Scheibner’s research interests span intellectual property and industrial property law—with a particular focus on software and biotechnology inventions—as well as data privacy and health law. He also explores topics in bioethics and institutional economics (including common pool resource theory), applying these frameworks to understand and inform regulatory and policy challenges in rapidly evolving legal contexts.
As an educator, Dr Scheibner coordinates Advanced Legal Research, Reforming Social Justice and Modern Technology, Artificial Intelligence and International Law within the Flinders Juris Doctor program, and leads the Health Law topic in the Bachelor of Laws. His teaching and research underscore a commitment to bridging cutting-edge innovation with ethical, legal, and social considerations to advance equitable and responsible practice.