NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - Alan Guttmacher this week took the controls as acting director at the National Human Genome Research Institute, after former director Francis Collins officially stepped down.
After serving as director of the institute for 15 years, Collins announced two months ago that he planned to leave NHGRI to dedicate some time to “writing, reflection, and exploration of other professional opportunities in the public or private sectors.”
Guttmacher is a pediatrician and medical geneticist. He has held leadership jobs at NHGRI for nearly a decade and has been deputy director for around six years.
Before he was deputy director, Guttmacher was NHGRI’s senior clinical advisor to the director and was director of the Office of Policy, Communications, and Education.
The National Institutes of Health will “conduct a broad search” for Collins’ replacement, NHGRI said this week, but details of that search process remain to be finalized.
"NHGRI and its collaborators, both at the NIH and throughout the biomedical research community, are moving ahead with our historic efforts to understand the intricacies of the human genome and how it functions,” Guttmacher said in a statement.
Celera has named Jean Amos Wilson to the post of president of laboratory operations at its Berkeley HeartLab subsidiary. She will assume the post on Aug. 11.
Amos Wilson formerly was senior director of genetic services at Sequenom, and before that she was scientific director of human genetics at Focus Diagnostics and director of molecular genetics at Specialty Laboratories. She is a fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics, a member of the board of directors of the American Board of Medical Genetics, and chair of the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute.
Karin Eastham and Laurence McCarthy have joined Genoptix’s board of directors. Eastham will serve as a Class I director of Genoptix until the company’s 2011 stockholders annual meeting, and she will sit on the board’s audit committee. McCarthy will function as a Class II director until the 2009 annual stockholders meeting, and he will serve on the board’s compliance committee. Eastham has been executive VP, COO, and trustee at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research since 2004.
McCarthy is a venture partner with Ampersand Ventures and president of Scientific Technologies and Solutions. He also has been president, CEO, chairman, and CTO of Focus Diagnostics, and he was president of the US Diagnostics Division of Boehringer Mannheim.
GenVault has appointed Myla Lai-Goldman and Jack Ballantyne to its scientific advisory board. Goldman currently is CMO, executive VP, and is on the executive committee at Laboratory Corporation of America. Ballantyne is an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Central Florida, and is associate director for research at the University’s National Center for Forensic Sciences.
BioTrove has appointed Derek Potter to be director of European business operations, a position based in London. Potter formerly was European sales manager for Applied Biosystems, and he was involved in establishing Fluidigm’s European operations.
CombiMatrix has appointed Colin Collins to the scientific advisory board of its subsidiary, CombiMatrix Molecular Diagnostics. Collins is associate professor of urology at the Cancer Research Institute and the department of molecular medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Collins’ research has led to the identification of genetic markers that have been used to risk-stratify cancer patients. He also invented a method of analyzing the structure of tumor genomes called end sequence profiling.
OpGen tapped Larry Wellman to be VP of human resources. Wellman has been VP of human resources at Digene, which is now part of Qiagen, and he has held a number of human resources positions in various industries.
Joanne Sun has taken the post of director of protein analytics and high-throughput purification at the antibody discovery company Adimab. Sun formerly was involved in developing infrastructure for clinical trials at Adnexus Therapeutics, and was involved in pre-clinical development at Abbott.
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