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People in the News: New Appointments at Illumina, Pacific Biosciences, Qiagen, Quanterix, More

Illumina: Susan Tousi, Alex Aravanis

Illumina has appointed Susan Tousi as chief commercial officer and has given CTO Alex Aravanis additional duties related to research and product development.

Tousi has led Illumina's global product development since 2012. Prior to joining Illumina, she was corporate VP and general manager for Eastman Kodak's consumer inkjet systems business. She holds an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Aravanis will take over product development in addition to his duties as chief technology officer. He began at Illumina in 2013 and left in 2016 to cofound liquid biopsy firm Grail, where he was chief scientific officer and head of R&D. Aravanis rejoined Illumina in June 2020 as CTO (Illumina is trying to acquire Grail for about $8 billion, a move that the US Federal Trade Commission has challenged). He holds an MD and doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University.


Pacific Biosciences: Catherine Ball, Kathleen Lynch, Michele Farmer

Pacific Biosciences has appointed Catherine Ball to the newly created position of senior VP of research; Kathleen Lynch as head of global government affairs; and Michele Farmer as chief accounting officer.

Ball was most recently chief scientific officer of Ancestry DNA where she built a team to create the genotyping platform and analytical approaches behind the AncestryDNA and AncestryHealth direct-to-consumer products and services. She holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Lynch will lead PacBio's government affairs and corporate communications. She joins the firm from Illumina, where she originated that company's political lobbying efforts and was VP of global government affairs and public policy. She has also held leadership roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Life Technologies, and Invitrogen. She holds a law degree from St. John's University School of Law.

Farmer also joins PacBio from Illumina, where she was senior director of accounting. She is a certified public accountant.


Qiagen: Scientific Advisory Board Appointees

Qiagen has created a scientific advisory board, the first in the company's history, and named three inaugural members: Peter Kaspar, who has help multiple leadership positions at Roche Diagnostics and BioMerieux; Patrice Nordmann, chair of the medical and molecular microbiology department at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; and Neville Sanjana, a core faculty member at the New York Genome Center and an assistant professor at New York University.

Ross Levine, a member of Qiagen's supervisory board and a US physician scientist focused on blood and bone marrow cancers, will chair the SAB; while Metin Colpan, an advisory board member and Qiagen cofounder, will serve as vice-chair.


Quanterix: Masoud Toloue

Quanterix has named Masoud Toloue as president of Quanterix and diagnostics, effective June 9. He joins Quanterix from PerkinElmer, where he most recently served as senior vice president, diagnostics, and previously led the applied genomics business. Prior to this, he founded and led Bioo Scientific's next-generation sequencing business, which PerkinElmer acquired in 2016. He also cofounded and led Genohub. He holds a doctorate in molecular cell biology from the University at Buffalo and was a postdoc in biochemistry at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.


For additional recent items on executive appointments and promotions in the omics and molecular diagnostics industries, please see the People in the News page on our website.

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