Dr. Ed Pagani serves as the Assistant Vice President of External Partnerships and Executive Director of the Office for External Partnerships (OEP) at Duke University. In this capacity, Pagani and the OEP team are dedicated to fostering collaborations between Duke faculty and various external entities including industry, other academic institutions, government agencies, and foundations. The primary goal is to establish regional and international partnerships aimed at advancing both basic and translational research at Duke and for its partners. Pagani brings a wealth of experience to his role, having worked in both industry and academia, with a particular emphasis on areas such as drug discovery, clinical diagnostics, and intellectual property transfer. Before joining Duke in 2022, he spent over eight years at the University of Michigan's Office of Innovation Partnerships, where he held the position of Managing Director of Therapeutic Partnerships. Throughout his career, Pagani has held diverse management and executive positions spanning twenty-seven years in the pharmaceutical and clinical diagnostic sectors. Notable roles include leading drug discovery programs and overseeing strategic research alliances and intellectual property licensing at Pfizer, and as General Manager/Assistant Vice President at Beckman Coulter managing an ISO 13485 certified chemical manufacturing site to support new product development and sales, and Beckman's immunodiagnostic assay business. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Columbia University and a doctorate in physiology from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Furthermore, he undertook post-doctoral training at Brigham & Women's Hospital/Harvard Medical School, with the support of a fellowship from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.