Ken Shadlen is Professor of Development Studies in LSE’s Department of International Development. He was Head of Department (2017-2020). From 2011-2020 Ken was a Managing Editor of the Journal of Development Studies.
Ken received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to his arrival at LSE in 2002, Ken was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies at Brown University and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami.
Ken works on the comparative and international political economy of development. Currently, his main areas of research include the global and cross-national politics of intellectual property (IP), and the politics of pharmaceutical assistance and health regulation. He is the author of Coalitions and Compliance: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Patents in Latin America (Oxford Univ Press, 2017) and multiple articles on the globalization of pharmaceutical patenting from the 1990s to the present. During the COVID-19 pandemic he published articles in The Lancet, Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine, and Issues in Science and Technology on innovation, production, and access to vaccines and therapeutics, and he is currently investigating the political economy of technology transfer for pharmaceutical production.