Kim Elaine Barrett, PhD, is the vice dean for research and distinguished professor of physiology and membrane biology at the UC Davis School of Medicine. Barrett is advancing an innovative vision for the future of research at the School of Medicine that emphasizes collaboration to transform health. She is responsible for implementing key initiatives and fostering partnerships across UC Davis Health and with other schools, centers, and colleagues throughout UC Davis. Barrett also leads the medical school’s collaborative efforts to develop UC Davis’ Aggie Square research program.
Barrett joined UC Davis Health in 2021 with more than 30 years of notable scientific research and institutional leadership experience. Immediately prior to UC Davis, Barrett was a distinguished professor of medicine at UC San Diego and director of the division of graduate education at the National Science Foundation. She has received numerous honors and awards for her research, teaching, mentoring, and service activities. Barrett is also an internationally recognized scholar in gastrointestinal physiology and has published extensively.
She has received numerous awards for her academic contributions as well as her teaching, administrative skills, and mentoring. These include the 2021 Distinguished Achievement Award for Basic Science from the American Gastroenterological Association.
Barrett is originally from the United Kingdom and earned both her BSc (Medicinal Chemistry, 1979) and her PhD (Biological Chemistry, 1982) from University College, London, England.
Alternate Member
Donald P. Taylor, PhD, MBA, CLP
Chief Ventures Officer of UC Davis Health
Donald P. Taylor is the inaugural Chief Ventures Officer of UC Davis Health Ventures, where he leads efforts to partner with innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry teams to commercialize human health intellectual property and advance research translation for clinical and financial impact. Before UC Davis, Dr. Taylor was Executive Director of Licensing at Ohio State, where he led a team overseeing licensing and intellectual property for over $1.3B in annual research across 16 colleges, including the College of Medicine and Wexner Medical Center. Prior to Ohio State, he served as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Commercial Translation in Health Sciences, Executive Director of sciVelo, co-director of the Center for Commercial Applications of Healthcare Data, and Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh from 2016 to 2021. At Pitt, he worked with the health sciences and engineering schools to commercialize health sciences research and intellectual property and also served as Associate Director of Entrepreneurship for the Center for Medical Innovation. He taught courses on medical product entrepreneurship and innovation at Pitt and was a Senior Lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught healthcare IT innovation and entrepreneurial methods.
A five-time life sciences entrepreneur, Dr. Taylor previously served as vice president of corporate development at Cellumen, a bio-tools drug discovery company, and its spin-off, Cernostics, a cancer diagnostics company. He was also a global pharmaceutical market segment manager at Thermo Fisher Scientific, leading marketing campaigns for a $400M portfolio. Before that, he held business development roles at Vivisimo, later acquired by IBM, and co-founded NetHealth, the largest EMR provider for the wound healing market. He has also served on the boards of several biotech companies and spent six years in life sciences economic development and venture investment as an Executive in Residence at the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse.
Dr. Taylor’s research in breast cancer metastasis and cell therapies has been published in high-impact journals like Cancer Research, and he was invited to present at the American Association for Cancer Research. He is a co-inventor on a patent filed from his research in cell therapy within the related field of wound healing.
In 2023, Dr. Taylor was conferred as a distinguished alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh for his pioneering work in biomedical entrepreneurship and research translation. Dr. Taylor earned a BS in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University and his MS, PhD in bioengineering, and MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, where he also completed postdoctoral research in pathology.