As Executive Director for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), Dorit Donoviel, Ph.D., leads a $0.25B NASA-funded innovation research program that finds and funds disruptive human health and performance solutions for astronauts exploring deep space. She leads both domestic and international research programs that bridge academia, industry, and government to deliver fast and cost-effective tangible results. Under her leadership, TRISH established the only commercial spaceflight human research program and database, collecting biomedical data and samples from private individuals exploring space into a shared repository to be used by the research community. Dr. Donoviel is the recipient of public service awards from the NASA Human Research Program and the Pioneer Award from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute and was selected as a Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) Woman of Excellence and a Scholar of the Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. She serves on the Brain Trust of the XPrize Foundation, the Inter-Astra advisory board, and the Board of Trustees of the Health and Environmental Sciences Institute. Dr. Donoviel authors scientific and popular press articles. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Discovery at BCM, and the Center for Space Medicine where she lectures to and mentors graduate and medical students.

Before coming to BCM, Dr. Donoviel led a drug discovery program at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals. She received a bachelor's degree in Biochemistry from the University of California, San Diego, and a doctorate in Biochemistry from the University of Washington. Dr. Donoviel completed a Human Frontiers Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.