Donald P. Taylor, PhD, MBA, CLP, serves as the inaugural Chief Ventures Officer of UC Davis Health (UCDH) and leads the UCDH Ventures Office. The Ventures Office partners with the innovation and entrepreneurship teams at UC Davis to develop and commercialize intellectual property and advance research translation.
Prior to joining UC Davis Health, Dr. Taylor was executive director of licensing for The Ohio State University since 2021. There he built and led a team of 15 people who oversee licensing and intellectual property for over $1.3 billion in annual research spend across all 16 colleges, including the College of Medicine and the Wexner Medical Center. Prior to Ohio State he served as assistant vice chancellor for commercial translation in the 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 2016-2021.
A five-time life sciences entrepreneur, prior to his academic career Dr. Taylor served as vice president of corporate development for Cellumen, Inc., a bio-tools drug discovery company, and for its spinoff, Cernostics, Inc., a cancer molecular diagnostics company. Prior to these positions, Taylor was the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology market segment manager for Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., where he led product marketing campaigns and a sales team of more than 500 people responsible for $400 million in revenue. His first startup, nethealth, today employs over 1,000 people worldwide with annual revenue exceeding $100M where he served as co-founder and CEO.
Dr. Taylor earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering and an M.B.A. at Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business. He conducted postdoctoral research in pathology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and is a co-inventor on a stem cell-based therapeutic patent filing. Dr. Taylor was conferred as a distinguished alumnus of the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 for his pioneering work in biomedical entrepreneurship and research translation.