Executive Director
Darren Cooke is the executive director of the Berkeley Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, a professional faculty member at the Haas School of Business, and chair of the Bio Track at the Berkeley SkyDeck startup accelerator. He teaches entrepreneurship at Haas and for the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. He is an investor and former chair of Medical Device and Digital Health at Life Science Angels. As an attorney, he led the IP legal team for the life science tools group of Bio-Rad Laboratories, and was a life sciences patent litigator at Covington & Burling. Before law school, he was a mechanical engineer developing cochlear implants at UCSF.
Faculty Director
Katherine (Kathy) Yelick is the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. She is also a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yelick's research is in high performance computing, programming languages, compilers, and parallel algorithms. She led the ExaBiome project on scalable tools for analyzing microbial data and co-led the Berkeley Benchmarking and Optimization (Bebop) group. She is known for her work on partitioned global address space languages, automatic performance tuning, high performance genome analysis. She was the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at LBNL from 2010 through 2019 and prior to that led the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). She is a member of National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.