Suresan Sachithananthan

Suresh Sachi is the Deputy Chief Executive and concurrently the General Counsel of the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR). He is a lawyer and a qualified Patent Agent.

He oversees the corporate functions for the Agency and supports the various entities under the Agency in the functions of Finance, Corporate Communications, Infrastructure Planning & Facilities Management, Information Systems & Technology, Enterprise Risk Management and Organisational Excellence. His role is to ensure that A*STAR’s resources are deployed in an efficient and integrated manner.

As the Agency’s General Counsel, he has charge of all legal and intellectual property matters and is responsible for establishing, implementing and maintaining A*STAR’s legal, intellectual property, risk management and compliance policies.

Before joining A*STAR, Suresh Sachi was in private legal practice in a leading law firm where he was a partner in the Technology and Intellectual Property Department.

Mr Sachi spearheaded a number of national efforts to coordinate and streamline legal and IP terms across Singapore’s public agencies, including the Public Sector Master Research Collaboration Agreement (MRCA), bringing together all public sector agencies engaged in R&D in a single research collaboration agreement; the Master Clinical Trials Agreement across all public sector trial centres; streamlining and aligning public sector RIE grant terms and conditions and establishing a National IP Protocol for Singapore.

He currently serves on the board of IPOS and IPOS International and the board of the A*STAR Research Entities. He was a former member of the board of governors of and an advisor to the IP Academy. Mr Sachi is a founding member and past president of the Licensing Executives Society (LES) Singapore. He served for more than 10 years on the Ethics Committee of the Singapore Eye Research Institute and is currently a member of the SingHealth Centralised Institutional Review Board.

As a specialist in intellectual property and technology transfer, Mr Sachi is a frequent speaker at the Global Forum on Intellectual Property and other forums by the World Intellectual Property Organisation, LES Singapore, the IP Academy, and the Law Society of Singapore. He is an active coach and trainer in the IP landscape in Singapore. He was named in the 2019 IAM 300 magazine as one of the World’s Leading IP Strategists (IAM 300).