Johannes Christian Wichard, a national of Germany, is Deputy Director of the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center and Head of the Legal Development Sect. He holds a masters degree from Harvard Law School and a PhD in law from Tübingen University, Germany. Before joining WIPO in 1998, he was responsible for trademark and unfair competition law in the German Federal Ministry of Justice, and, before that, taught German and international private law at the Universities of Tübingen and Berlin.