About

Alejandra Castro is the head of legal, patents and compliance at Bayer Central America and the Caribbean. During her time at Bayer she has encouraged a business partner model for the legal patents and compliance (LPC) department: ‘We’re planning for the future in LPC and becoming robust, commercially-minded business partners is something we think will be valuable for us in LPC and great for the Bayer business as a whole’, says Castro. She has encouraged the team to be wholly involved in the business in order to provide the best possible advice, resulting in the feat of being more than a regional department taking care of legal matters, but a team that develops business strategy from a legal point of view to enhance the business priorities. Before joining Bayer, she was partner at Arias & Muñoz in Costa Rica, where she was head of the intellectual property and biotechnology law department. Prior to joining the law firm, Alejandra was Pfizer´s legal and corporate affairs director for Central America and the Caribbean. She is the co-founder of the Costa Rican Information Technology Association and the founder of the UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) Master’s degree in intellectual property program, where she served as faculty director for four years. Castro also acted as head of the Plan Integrado de Competitividad and as ALFA project manager for the Costa Rican National Insurance Institute, where she supervised country-wide preparations to open the Costa Rican insurance market to competition after 80 years of monopoly. She was also vice-president of the Costa Rican Bar Association, and vice president of the National Chamber of Technology (CAMTIC). In 2011, the World Intellectual Property Rights Organization (WIPO) named Castro as its advisor responsible for designing the Costa Rican National strategy on intellectual property rights. In 2012, she was also designated by WIPO to draft the National Strategy on Intellectual Property for Trinidad and Tobago. In 2013, she was awarded the 40 Minors of 40 Award, by the newspaper El Financiero, as a recognition of her career in Law. In 2015 she was named by the Central American magazine Strategy+Business as one of the most outstanding young women attorneys in the region.