The program was organized by Richard Litman, US Managing Director of Arabic Innovation Management and Patent Attorney at Litman Law, located in the Washington, DC area. He was joined on the training team by experienced researcher Dr. David Warburton, a research specialist who is Director of the Developmental Biology and Regenerative Medicine Program and Vice Chair of the Department of Surgery at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, California. The research center is affiliated with the University of Southern California.

Richard Litman received his doctorate in law with honors, and holds two advanced law degrees. One degree is in Patent and Trade Regulation Law, received while serving as a postgraduate fellow in Food and Drug Law.  He has been an intellectual property lawyer for over 30 years, and is chairman of a commercial bank. He is a trusted resource for universities in the Kingdom. He is a frequent speaker at universities in the GCC, including King AbdulAziz University, King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals, King Faisal University, King Saud AbdulAziz University for the Health Sciences, Imam Mohammad University, Kuwait University and the University of Bahrain.

David Warburton leads a team of 60 researchers in developmental biology, regenerative medicine and surgery and is a professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and School of Dentistry. He has over 30 years of experience in doing high quality research, has hundreds of publications, and speaks at many conferences.

The workshop helped fulfill the Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd Center’s mission to develop broad knowledge among Saudi researchers through workshops that inspire collaboration and communication in a multi-institutional context. Faculty, students and others interested in research are encouraged to attend.

The speakers discussed how to get started, developing a research project, picking the right collaborators, how to approach the grant writing process. how to write winning grant proposals, identifying real milestones, and matching the funder’s goals. Participants learned how to be proactive in using global patent information to accelerate the process of developing breakthrough outcomes, the approach to maintaining research records and developing an effective written disclosure, how the disclosure is evaluated for protection, filing patent applications before publication, and other ways to protect  projects through trademark, copyright, and by contract.  

Participants were given an opportunity to ask questions, have their projects reviewed, and discuss international collaborations.