​Dr. Mardson McQuay is Associate General Counsel and Senior IP Attorney at KAUST.  Prior to his arrival at KAUST, Mardson was Senior Vice-President and Chief IP Counsel for CGG, in Paris, France for six years.  Responsibilities included providing in-house counsel on all IP-related matters, supervising the work of outside IP litigation and prosecution counsels, preparing freedom-to-practice opinions, and drafting, negotiating and managing licenses, and third-party technology developments.  He also served as Senior Patent Counsel for General Electric, covering several GE businesses, including Oil & gas, Aviation, and Energy.  Before moving in-house, Mardson was an IP associate at Oblon, Spivak, McClelland, Maier, & Neustadt, P.C., Alexandria, VA for four years.  Prior to his legal career, Dr. McQuay was a tenured Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah for sixteen years.  Responsibilities included the obtaining and supervising more than 4.5 million dollars in fundamental and applied research from federal funding agencies and industrial sponsors in the thermo-sciences area, including fundamental and applied combustion, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, laser-based instrumentation, and computational fluid mechanics.  Author or co-author of five invited papers, two textbooks on fundamentals of combustion, book chapters, and reviews, archival journal publications, conference papers, and invited lectures in various parts of the world. During a sabbatical year in 1996/97, he was an invited Professor at Ecole Central Paris in France and an Elf Aquitaine Fellow responsible for supervising the work of one post-doctoral fellow and one graduate student on an EU-funded experimental project studying real-time, in-situ monitoring and control of gas turbine combustors.