Dr. Elizabeth Howard

Chairperson

Elizabeth is Executive Vice-President, General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Arbutus Biopharma, and has been practicing law for more than 20 years. Prior to joining Arbutus in March 2016, Dr. Howard was a partner at the law firm of Orrick Herrinton, where, in addition to her focus on intellectual property and trade secrets disputes, she was an active participant in Orrick's pro bono program, including leading Orrick's pro bono program working with the homeless at St. Vincent de Paul's in San Francisco, and as lead lawyer on multiple predatory lending cases, for which she received the firm-wide pro-bono award. Dr. Howard also served as a director for the non-profit organization Bay Bio. Before law school, Dr. Howard was an NSF Plant Molecular Biology Postdoctoral Fellow at the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry in Canberra Australia and a Research Geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Howard obtained her doctorate in Molecular Biology from the University of California Berkeley, and a J.D. from the University of California Hastings College of the law.