Remembering Professor Dmitry Karshtedt
The GW Law community suffered a tragic loss on October 30 with the sudden passing of Professor Dmitry Karshtedt, a brilliant patent law scholar and beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague.
An accomplished, award-winning legal scholar and PhD chemist, Professor Karshstedt joined the GW Law faculty in 2015 and quickly earned a reputation as a leading voice in patent law. His legal scholarship has been published in the Iowa Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, among others, and cited in three of the leading patent law casebooks, a casebook on intellectual property, and several treatises. He won a number of awards for his outstanding academic work, including the Samsung-Stanford Patent Prize and the scholarship grant for judicial clerks sponsored by the University of Houston Law Center Institute for Intellectual Property and Information Law.
Prior to entering the legal field, Professor Karshtedt earned a PhD in chemistry from U.C. Berkeley and worked as a staff scientist for a semiconductor materials startup. He was the first-named author on five scientific publications and a co-inventor on 12 U.S. patents.
Professor Karshtedt received his law degree from Stanford Law School in 2011, where he served as the Senior Symposium Editor for the Stanford Law Review. He launched his legal career as an attorney in the Patent Counseling and Innovation Group at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto and clerked for the Honorable Kimberly A. Moore on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Immediately before joining GW Law, he was a Fellow at the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School. In the fall of 2021, Professor Karshtedt served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law in the Centre for Advanced Studies in Biomedical Innovation Law.
Professor Karshstedt’s legacy will live on at GW Law, where he made a profound and enduring impact on students and colleagues alike.
The family requests that gifts in memory of Dmitry be directed to the George Washington Law School to establish a scholarship fund in his memory.
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A Message from Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew
Dear GW Law Community,
It is with profound sorrow that I am writing to inform you of the passing of our colleague, Professor Dmitry Karshtedt. With Dmitry's sudden death, members of the GW Law community have lost a precious teacher, mentor, and friend. The entire legal academic community has lost a brilliant scholar at the height of his career. Read more about Professor Karshtedt's academic career and scholarship here.
We will share further information soon to offer assistance to those closely affected, and there are additional on-call crisis counseling services available by calling 877-841-1080. Resources also are available for our students through Counseling and Psychological Services and for our staff and faculty through the Employee Assistance Program. In addition, the university’s CARE Team is available if you are concerned about a student.
The Law School will hold a memorial service so that all members of our community will have an opportunity to gather in remembrance of Dmitry. I will keep you informed of this as well as any memorial service that may be planned by Dmitry’s family, who will remain in our thoughts and prayers.
In Sadness,
Dayna Bowen Matthew
Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law