Overview

His post-grant experience includes both inter partes review and ex parte reexaminations. He has appeared in more than 50 AIA proceedings as the petitioner or the patent owner. He drafts reissue applications and handles appeals, including oral argument before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. He manages the portfolios of several mid-sized companies. He also has handling experience for several U.S. District Court cases and International Trade Commission proceedings. 

Before his legal career, Yao was a senior member of the research staff at Philips Research North America and a senior scientist at Pfizer Global R&D. He conducted in-depth research in areas of medical imaging systems, data-intensive image processing, advanced instrumentation, drug discovery and safety, and molecular imaging and medicine. 

While conducting his doctoral research, Yao served as a student system administrator at the University of Michigan and designed and implemented a 64-element forward-viewing ring-annular array for a commercial intravascular ultrasound imaging system. The array is capable of both forward and sideward viewing in synthetic aperture mode for real-time imaging of human coronary arteries during vascular interventions. Yao was also the speaker at several IEEE symposia on this topic in Munich, Germany, and Honolulu, Hawaii. 

While studying for his master's degree, Yao invented a magnetic resonance imaging technique to noninvasively map spatial temperature distribution with a sensitivity of 5 mºC. He was the recipient of a travel stipend to orally present the results for ISMRM in Sydney, Australia. 

Yao is the named inventor on four U.S. patent applications.