Professor Herder teaches primarily in the Faculty of Medicine, across the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculums, on a variety of health law topics, including informed consent, patient-physician confidentiality, and regulation of the medical profession. Prior to arriving at Dalhousie, he taught in the areas of bioethics and intellectual property law at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Law.

Professor Herder’s research interests cluster around biomedical innovation policy, with particular focus on intellectual property law and practices connected to the commercialization of scientific research. As part of a three-year research project funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Professor Herder (Principal Investigator) and a team of interdisciplinary researchers are currently collecting empirical evidence about the inter-relationships between commercialization laws, policies, and practices and emerging health researchers. The team will use the collected empirical evidence to explore a series of normative questions about the ongoing commercialization of academic science.