Barbara Araneo, Ph.D., serves Novo Nordisk, Inc as a Director in External Innovation Sourcing, a unit linked to Novo Nordisk’s Global Research Department. Previously, she was a member of the JDRF Research team as the Director of the Diabetes Complications Therapeutic Area, where her role was to create and manage a portfolio of externally funded research grants aimed at translation of primary discovery along the path of new therapeutics and biomarkers. Dr. Araneo served on the faculty of the University of Utah’s Department of Pathology as Associate Professor and has over 70 publications and 30 patents. In addition to her academic career, Dr. Araneo was Vice President of Development at StemCells Inc., where she was responsible for directing the effort to bring the company’s neural cell-based product candidate from the exploratory and preclinical proof of principle stages into clinical development under the FDA regulatory process. Prior to joining StemCells, Dr. Araneo was a Scientific Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Pharmadigm, a privately held biopharmaceutical company with a number of products discovered at the company and developed for various stages of clinical development for inflammatory conditions. Over her career Dr. Araneo specialized in translational research concentrating on bringing disease-modifying targets through validation and drug proof of concept. She has led project teams to enable filing of INDs, communicate with the FDA and initiate first in man clinical trials. Dr. Araneo obtained her doctorate in Cellular Immunology from the University of Rochester and completed postdoctoral training at Washington University School of Medicine and the Department of Microbiology at UCLA. In addition to a doctorate degree, Dr. Araneo holds certification in US Regulatory Affairs.