Berkeley LSEC Leadership

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

Rich Lyons is UC Berkeley’s Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer. From 2008 to 2018 he served as dean of UC Berkeley's Haas School where he currently holds the William and Janet Cronk Chair in Innovative Leadership. For the two years prior to serving as dean he was the Chief Learning Officer at Goldman Sachs. He received his BS with highest honors from UC Berkeley (business) and PhD from MIT (economics). Before (re)joining Berkeley, Rich was on the faculty at Columbia University. His research and teaching expertise is in international economics/finance and his top applied interest is the “how and why” of setting strong institutional cultures.