Deepa Varadarajan

Deepa Varadarajan, associate professor of law, focuses on intellectual property law and innovation. Her scholarship examines how trade secrecy (and associated contractual restrictions, such as non-disclosure and non-compete clauses) can impact employee mobility, follow-on innovation and the public interest. Her recent work explores the intersection of trade secrecy, freedom of information laws and employee whistleblower protections. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Cornell Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Emory Law Journal and Yale Law Journal, among other publications. Her work has been selected for presentation at leading venues, including the Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum and the plenary session of the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference, and has been featured four times in the Journal of Things We Like Lots (JOTWELL). She is also the author of a novel, "Late Bloomers" (Random House, 2023), and her short stories have appeared in the Georgia Review and Colorado Review.

Prior to joining Georgia State University, Varadarajan was an assistant professor at St. John’s University School of Law and a Thomas C. Grey Law Fellow at Stanford Law School. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and co-editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Charles P. Sifton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and she was a litigation associate at Covington & Burling LLP.