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People in the News: New Appointments at Sema4, NHGRI, Dante Labs, Ancestry, More

Sema4: Gustavo Stolovitzky

Gustavo Stolovitzky has been appointed as CSO of Sema4. He joins the company from IBM Research, where he was an IBM Fellow as well as the founding chair of the Exploratory Life Sciences program. He holds an M.S. degree in physics from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in engineering and applied sciences from Yale University.


NHGRI: Charles Rotimi

Charles Rotimi has been selected as the next scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He will succeed Dan Kastner and begin his new appointment in early October. Rotimi is currently an NIH Distinguished Investigator, director of the trans-NIH Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health, and chief of the NHGRI Metabolic, Cardiovascular, and Inflammatory Disease Genomics Branch. He holds a bachelor's degree in science from the University of Benin in Nigeria, a master's degree in healthcare administration from the University of Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.


Dante Labs: Andre Nel, Dalila Rahmani, Laura D'Angelo, Omar Elbakshish, Rachel Haverfield

Dante Labs has appointed Andre Nel as CFO, Dalila Rahmani as chief accounting officer, Laura D'Angelo as VP of investor relations, Omar Elbakshish as senior director of business finance, and Rachel Haverfield as general counsel.

Nel, Rahmani, Elbakshish, and Haverfield come to Dante from Illumina. Nel was VP of finance at Illumina and previously worked at Pfizer. Rahmani most recently led the commercial finance team at Illumina. Before, she was an auditor at Ernst & Young. Haverfield was previously VP of legal EMEA at Illumina.

D'Angelo joins Dante from Invitae, where she was head of investor relations.


Ancestry: Brian Donnelly, Ashish Nayyar, Heather Friedland

Ancestry has appointed Brian Donnelly as senior VP and general manager of AncestryDNA and Ashish Nayyar as chief data officer, and has promoted Heather Friedland to chief product officer.

Donnelly joins the firm from Amazon, where he was head of diagnostics and genomics. Prior to that, he held various roles at genomics companies including Sequenom and Illumina, and was chief commercial officer at Codex DNA.

Nayyar comes to Ancestry from Facebook, where he was senior director of data science.

Friedland was most recently Ancestry's senior VP of new products and growth. Previously, she served as chief product officer at Glassdoor.


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