Ken Walsh has been appointed to the scientific advisory board of Health Discovery Corporation, a biotechnology company focused on biomarker and pathway discovery for diagnostic markers and drug targets. Welsh is currently a professor of clinical genomics at Royal Brompton Hospital and Imperial College in London. He is also a science advisor to the West London Transplant Center, and a visiting professor at Oxford University and the University of Utrecht. He received a BSc, PhD and DSc from Newcastle University.
Health Discovery Corp. also named Vladimir Vapnik to the scientific advisory board. Vapnik, who won the Humboldt Research award in 2003, is currently a senior researcher at NEC Research.
Marcus Conant has been named to the board of directors of Farmingdale, NY-based Enzo Biochem. Conant is a clinical professor at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. He received his BS and MD degrees from Duke University. He served as principal investigator of Phase I studies of the company’s gene medicine for HIV-1 infection. He is also chairman of the board of the Conant Foundation, an HIV/AIDS education and research foundation based in San Francisco.
Eric Fung of Ciphergen Biosystems has been promoted to vice president for clinical and medical affairs in the company's diagnostics division. He joined Ciphergen in 2000 as a lead scientist in its biomarker discovery center laboratories. Fung holds an MD and PhD in molecular neuroscience from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a BS in biology from Caltech.
Iain Mattaj will become director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, based in Heidelberg, following the departure of Fotis Kafatos, whose term ends next May. Mattaj joined EMBL in 1985, and was appointed scientific director of the organization in 1999.