Dorit Donoviel

Dorit Donoviel is the Director of the Biomedical Innovations Lab at the Center for Space Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine. She is also the Deputy Chief Scientist for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI). 

Dr. Donoviel interfaces with NASA at many levels ensuring programmatic alignment with the highest risks to human space flight while safeguarding scientific excellence. She is the recipient of several NASA Human Research Program awards and the NSBRI Outstanding Leadership Award, and serves on many advisory and review boards, and lectures about the space life sciences both nationally and internationally.

Dr. Donoviel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology, a member of the Center for Space Medicine, and an elected faculty senator at Baylor College of Medicine, lecturing and mentoring medical students in space biomedical research.

Before joining NSBRI, Dr. Donoviel was engaged in pharmaceutical drug discovery at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company based in The Woodlands, Texas. For eight years, she managed a metabolism research group that identified and validated targets for drug discovery by using in-vivo functional genomics technology, and developed small molecule compounds, antibody, and protein therapeutics against these validated targets.

Dr. Donoviel received her baccalaureate degree in biochemistry at University of California, San Diego, and doctorate also in Biochemistry at the University of Washington. She received a Human Frontiers International Fellowship to perform her postdoctoral research at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where she developed genetically engineered mouse models for Alzheimer’s Disease.