The George D. Smith Professor of Translational Medicine, founder and Director of Stanford University’s SPARK program, and President of SPARK Global, an international organization of academic translational research groups, Daria Mochly-Rosen helps academics navigate the so-called “valley of death” between drug discovery and development. Daria founded The SPARK Program at Stanford in 2006 after having to leave academia to start a pharmaceutical company in order to translate her groundbreaking protein kinase C research into cardiovascular therapeutics. Challenging the academic dogma of how scientific discoveries should reach the pharmaceutical industry, the SPARK model has been implemented internationally and has resulted in a book about drug development from academia. Currently a Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford, Daria is originally from Israel, where she received her doctorate in chemical immunology at the Weizmann Institute. She was also a TEDMED 2015 speaker.