Tempus: Ned Sharpless
Tempus said that Norman "Ned" Sharpless will serve as a senior strategic adviser to the company. Sharpless was most recently director of the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, a position he held from 2017 to 2022. He also served as acting commissioner for the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019 before returning to NCI. Prior to his time at NCI, Sharpless was director of the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. He received his M.D. from the UNC School of Medicine, and completed his clinical training at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, both of Harvard Medical School.
Oncocyte: Anish John
Oncocyte CFO Anish John said during the company's Q1 earnings call this week that he will be resigning his position effective June 15, 2023. John joined the company in 2021 as VP of operations and finance. Prior to that he was senior director of financial planning and analysis at Foundation Medicine. He also worked for 12 years for PerkinElmer, including as senior director of finance, Americas, for the diagnostics division.
Guardant Health: Ines Dahne-Steuber, Darya Chudova
Guardant Health has appointed Ines Dahne-Steuber as its chief operating officer and promoted Darya Chudova to the role of chief technology officer.
Prior to joining Guardant Health, Dahne-Steuber served as senior VP of operational excellence and president of Spectra Laboratories at Fresenius Medical Care North America. Before that, she served in various leadership roles at Quest Diagnostics, most recently as general manager for oncology and VP of healthcare IT solutions. She earned both a B.A. and master's degree from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.
Chudova has been with Guardant Health for eight years, most recently serving as the senior VP of technology. Prior to her work at Guardant, Chudova developed tools for clinical diagnostics and interpretation of genomic expression and sequencing data in the context of molecular cytology at Veracyte, and worked in noninvasive prenatal testing at Illumina. She holds a Ph.D. from UC Irvine.
National Academy of Sciences: Claire Fraser
Claire Fraser has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She is a professor in the department of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the founding director of the university's Institute for Genome Sciences. Previously, she was an investigator at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR).
23andMe: Reza Afkhami
23andMe has named Reza Afkhami chief corporate development officer. In that role, he will oversee industry collaborations for the firm's therapeutics pipeline, research services, and consumer genomics operations. Afkhami joins 23andMe after serving as senior VP of corporate development and strategy at Global Blood Therapeutics while that firm was being acquired by Pfizer late last year.
Adela: Alan Williams
Adela said that Alan Williams has joined the company as chief operating officer. Williams has held many senior executive roles, most recently as chief development officer of SomaLogic. Prior to SomaLogic, he developed the first benchtop high-throughput NGS platform at Ion Torrent and the first transcriptome-on-a-chip platform at Affymetrix, Adela said.
Ribbon Biolabs: Jodi Barrientos
Synthetic biology company Ribbon Biolabs has appointed Jodi Barrientos as chief business officer. Barrientos was previously VP of commercial marketing for the Diagnostics Genomics Group at Agilent Technologies. During her tenure at Agilent, she also held leadership roles in commercial operations and sales in both clinical and research markets. Before joining Agilent, Barrientos served in global product management positions at Qiagen and field and technical applications at Roche Diagnostics. She holds a B.S. in molecular biology and microbiology from Purdue University.
DermTech: Bret Christensen, John Dobak
DermTech has appointed Bret Christensen as president, CEO, and a board member. He succeeds John Dobak, who stepped down from those roles. Christensen had been the chief commercial officer of diabetes-focused medical device firm Insulet. Prior to that, he was general manager of preventive care at Myriad Genetics. He also held several executive positions at Hologic, including VP of sales and marketing for the firm's gynecologic surgical products division.
For additional recent items on executive appointments, promotions, and departures in the omics and molecular diagnostics space, please see the People in the News page on our website.