Lloyd Kunimoto joined Pacific Biosciences as senior vice president of corporate development in September. Most recently, he was vice president of corporate strategy at Monsanto, where he was responsible for broadening the firm's access to cutting-edge technologies through R&D collaborations, licensing agreements, and partnerships with venture capital firms specializing in life science investing. Prior to Monsanto, he was president and CEO of Galileo Pharmaceuticals and Epicyte Pharmaceuticals, as well as senior vice president of corporate development of Exelixis. Before that, he served in various senior management roles, including president and CEO, for Calgene, an agricultural biotechnology company that was acquired by Monsanto. Kunimoto holds a BS in mathematics from Stanford University.
Martin Burow has become head of commercial operations for LifeCodexx, a subsidiary of German sequencing service provider GATC Biotech. He joins the company from Brahms, which was acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific last year, where he was sales manager for Asia Pacific. At LifeCodexx, Burow will help to establish “strategic access to various European key markets” for the firm's first non-invasive prenatal diagnostic test, which uses next-generation sequencing and is currently in development.
RainDance Technologies has appointed Richard Lussier as vice president of worldwide sales and Ingrid Choupin as managing director of European sales and marketing.
Lussier joins RainDance from Cell Biosciences, where he was vice president of worldwide sales and service. Previously, he held leading positions in sales and services at Solexa, now part of Illumina; Fluidigm; Applied Biosystems, now part of Life Technologies; and Celera Genomics. At Applied Biosystems, he was president and general manager of the company's Japanese subsidiary. Lussier holds an MBA from the Fox School of Business at Temple University and a BS in biology from Rhode Island College.
Choupin most recently was associate director of global sales and strategy development at Affymetrix. Prior to that, she held various sales and management positions at Invitrogen, now part of Life Technologies. Choupin, who will be based in France, holds a master's degree in biochemistry from the Université d'Orsay in Paris and a marketing management degree from the Institut Supérieur De Gestion, also in Paris.