Don Taylor, PhD, MBA, CLP
Chief Ventures Officer
UC Davis Health Ventures
Donald P. Taylor is the inaugural chief ventures officer of UC Davis Health Ventures, where he leads the Health Ventures Office. The office partners with the innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry engagement teams at UC Davis to develop and commercialize intellectual property and advance research translation.
Before joining UC Davis Health, Dr. Taylor served as The Ohio State University’s executive director of licensing and the University of Pittsburgh’s assistant vice chancellor for commercial translation in the health sciences. At Pitt, Dr. Taylor also served as an associate professor of Biomedical Informatics in the School of Medicine.
A five-time life sciences entrepreneur, Dr. Taylor headed 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, he led the global pharmaceutical and biotechnology marketing segments for Thermo Fisher Scientific.
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. He earned his B.S. degree in information systems from Carnegie Mellon University, 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.