On July 1, Lynn Dowling, executive director of the Genomic Medicine Institute at El Camino Hospital, will step down from her role. El Camino will continue to work with Dowling as a consultant. Meanwhile, Katherine Sutherland, medical director of GMI and Eric Pifer, the hospital's chief medical officer will take over leadership activities at GMI. Dowling's departure will not affect GMI programs, including genomics education for physicians and genetic counseling services for various programs.
The New York Genome Center has named Harold Swerdlow as its VP of technology innovation. Swerdlow formerly headed R&D at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, served as chief technology officer at Dolomite, and was senior director of research at Solexa.
Dan Roden, Vanderbilt University's assistant vice chancellor for Personalized Medicine, has been appointed to the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health. His four-year term begins Oct. 1. Roden is a principal investigator for two NIH-funded programs at Vanderbilt, the Pharmacogenomics Research Network and the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network. He also directs Vanderbilt's Oates Institute for Experimental Therapeutics.
Baylor College of Medicine has named Matthew Ellis as its director of the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Center, effective Sept. 1. He succeeds Kent Osborne, who is leaving his post to focus on his other job as director of Baylor's Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center.
Ellis, currently a professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, is focused on studying the molecular underpinnings of breast cancer. BCM received a grant from the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas to recruit Ellis, who will bring a large resource of patient-derived xenografts with him.