Student Opportunities
The Health, Law, Innovation, and Policy Lab (HLIP Lab) partners with the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and the Future of Law Lab in offering student clinical legal education academic externships, summer internships, and volunteer placements.
Our students gain hands-on experience working on legal issues that arise in clinical and bench research, quality improvement, technology transfer, innovation models, as well as entrepreneurship and commercialization in hospitals, research institutes, and academic healthcare settings. They participate in legal scholarship on healthcare policy, advocacy, administration, and systems planning and improvement.
Under the supervision of Dr. Leanne Tran, students can expect to gain exposure to fundamental aspects of substantive and procedural law applied in daily practice by:
- Participating in operational, business, internal client, collaborating organization, and other stakeholder meetings
- Conducting focused legal research, analyses, and environmental scans
- Drafting briefing notes, legal memoranda, standard operating procedures, and internal policies
- Drafting and negotiating contracts including amendments, non-disclosure/ confidentiality agreements, data transfer agreements, material transfer agreements, collaboration agreements, and biobank agreements
- Contributing to medical legal textbooks and textbook updates authored by Dr. Tran, manuscript submissions to journals, and whitepapers
- Learning about the roles of institutional, governance, and regulatory structures and agencies (e.g., Health Canada, Research Ethics Boards)
- Working collaboratively with legal professionals, health professionals, and academic researchers on multi-disciplinary initiatives
Examples of student project outcomes:
- Publications
- Environmental scans on the Canadian privacy landscape and harmonization of REBs in collaboration with Clinical Trials Ontario (CTO) and CHEER (Canadian Collaboration for Child Health: Efficiency and Excellence in the Ethics Review of Research)
- Intellectual Property research (e.g., patent searches, copyright research)
- Competitive landscape analyses
- Research and drafting for commercialization section of a grant funding application
- Research health data programs of funders
- Research NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy
- Research contractual language required in a procurement agreement for handling of Personal Health Information (PHI) and compliance with PHIPA for a Health Information Network Provider (HINP) and a Health Information Custodian (HIC)
- Due diligence (e.g., legal, regulatory, privacy, IT/IS) on a mobile app and on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company
Ongoing projects:
- Developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) data governance frameworks for academic research and industry collaborations
- Data licensing and commercialization research for Guideline/Policy/Best Practices document
- AI landscape across Canada including Federated Learning
- Contract review, drafting, and negotiations (e.g., revising confidentiality disclosure agreements and data transfer agreements)
- Professional development opportunities - attending conferences, webinars, and EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) sessions
If you are interested in learning more about these student opportunities, please contact: hliplab@lunenfeld.ca
