David Botstein, Francis Collins, and Eric Lander have jointly been awarded the 10th annual Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research for "profound insights [that] led to the mapping of the human genetic blueprint." The prize comes with a $500,000 cash award. They will receive the prize on April 23 during a celebration at the Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY.
Botstein is director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University, Collins is director of the National Institutes of Health, and Lander is president and director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Collins has declined his portion of the cash prize to comply with government ethics rules, according to NIH.
Leena Peltonen-Palotie died of cancer last week at the age of 57. She was head of human genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and also held appointments at the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Finland and at the Broad Institute. Previously, she was a professor at the University of Helsiniki and the National Public Health Institute in Finland. Peltonen-Palotie held MD and PhD degrees from the University of Oulu in Finland.
Carl Fuller has joined Life Technologies as director of chemistry for genome systems, where he is primarily working on the SOLiD platform. Previously, he was a science fellow at GE Healthcare.
Fredrik Dahl has been appointed chief technology officer at Olink Genomics, the firm said this week. Dahl will lead the company's R&D efforts, with a focus on developing its Selector technology and related products. Before joining Uppsala, Sweden-based Olink, Dahl held senior R&D positions at Complete Genomics and at Ion Torrent Systems. He did his postdoc at the Stanford Genome Technology Center under the supervision of Ron Davis.