Patrick Balthrop, Tom Erickson

Patrick Balthrop joins Luminex of Austin, Texas, as chief executive officer and president, the company announced Monday. He replaced interim chief executive officer Tom Erickson, who held the post for nearly two years and will stand for election to the company’s board of directors at the annual shareholders’ meeting this week. Balthrop joins Luminex, which manufactures and sells the xMap bead assay system for life sciences research, from his position as president of Fisher Healthcare, a Fisher Scientific International company. He was president of the company since 2002. Previously he served as an executive with Abbott Laboratories, primarily in the diagnostics division where he held the post of head of worldwide commercial diagnostics operations. Balthrop holds an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University, and a BS in Biology from Spring Hill College. The company said that the board of directors would consider Balthrop for the board, to serve until an election could be held at the 2005 annual meeting. Balthrop was granted incentive equity agreements consisting of a restricted stock grant for 200,000 shares of common stock and a contractual option grant for the purchase of an aggregate of 500,000 shares of the company’s common stock. The stock option grant has an exercise price of $9.36 per share and will fully vest over four years, subject to the terms of the option agreement. Luminex shares closed up at $10.40 Monday. Balthrop was not available for comment, the company said.