San Francisco Bay Area
Darren Cooke is UC Berkeley's Chief Innovation & Entrepreneurship Officer. He is also the executive director of the Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center, professional faculty at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and past chair of the Bio Track at the Berkeley SkyDeck startup accelerator. He has taught entrepreneurship at Haas and for the Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. Darren is the past 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 and Burling. Before law school, he was a mechanical engineer developing cochlear implants at UCSF.
The Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center is a virtual center designed to help founders navigate the outstanding resources on campus and provides bio-tailored entrepreneurship programs. Campus resources include: Bakar Labs, Integrative Genomics Institute (IGI), California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), Berkeley SkyDeck, and the Robinson Life Science, Business, and Entrepreneurship (LSBE) Program, among others. Programming includes I-Corps @ LSEC, LSEC-Nucleate Venture Fellows Program, LSEC Venture Grant Program, and Bio Startup Speed Teaming (now run by QB3). For more information: https://lsec.berkeley.edu
I teach entrepreneurship-related courses at the business school, including: Berkeley Changemaker: Human Health, UGBA13. Undergraduate course using two learning methods: weekly conversations with Human Health Changemakers, and a group project exploring an Area of Interest. More info at lsec.berkeley.edu/bc-hh Lean Transfer, MBA295T-2. Haas MBA and Berkeley graduate students form teams of 4-6 and test University of California technology for problem-solution-fit through 80+ stakeholder interviews following the Lean Startup curriculum. Introduction to Healthcare Consulting, UGBA198-4. Faculty sponsor for DeCal course hosted by the Phoenix Consulting Group.
Faculty for the NSF I-Corps program and the Bay Area Regional I-Corps Node (UC Berkeley, UCSF, Stanford). I-Corps is a set of programs that uses the Lean Startup curriculum to prepare scientists and engineers to find applications for their research beyond the laboratory, broadening the impact of NSF-funded research projects.
Member of coaching team for NSF's Convergence Accelerator. The Convergence Accelerator is a new capability within NSF to accelerate use-inspired, convergence research in areas of national importance that supports two of the Big Ideas and seeks to engage partnerships – notably public-private partnerships.
Life Science Angels is a Silicon Valley based seed-stage investment group. Since 2005, LSA has invested nearly $100M in close to 100 early-stage life science companies with over 17 exits and over $1B in follow-on investment from later-stage VCs.
Berkeley SkyDeck is UC Berkeley’s premier startup accelerator, supporting 150 startup teams per biannual cohort, with the 20 companies in the invested cohort each receiving $200k in investment from the SkyDeck Fund and more than $500k of in-kind startup support. See https://skydeck.berkeley.edu/bio-track for more information.