Jon Lorsch is to be the new director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, according to the National Institutes of Health. Currently, Lorsch is a professor at Johns Hopkins University where he studies translation initiation and control in a yeast system.
"With his reputation of being a broad-minded and visionary thinker with strong management skills, I am confident that Jon will lead NIH's basic science flagship to keep the US at the forefront of biomedical research," NIH Director Francis Collins says in a statement.
Lorsch, who is to take up the post in the summer, replaces Jeremy Berg, who stepped down as the NIGMS head in June of 2011; Judith Greenberg has been serving as the interim director. Additionally, the position had been offered to, and accepted by, Chris Kaiser from MIT, but he wound up declining the post for personal reasons.