NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Louis Gerstner has been elected chairman of the Broad Institute's board of directors, succeeding outgoing chair Diana Chapman Walsh, who will continue to serve on the board as vice chair.
Gerstner was elected to the Broad's board in 2010. He was CEO and chairman of the board of IBM from 1993 to 2002 and has also served as chairman of the Carlyle Group and CEO of RJR Nabisco.
Foundation Medicine has appointed Steven Kafka chief business officer, a newly created position. He joins the company from Aileron Therapeutics, where he served as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Previously, he was vice president of finance for Infinity Pharmaceuticals and senior director of finance at Millennium Pharmaceuticals.
Strand Diagnostics appointed Laura Beggrow as its president. Prior to joining Strand, Beggrow was VP of US sales and marketing at Genomic Health, where she helped grow annual sales of the Oncotype DX test from $10 million to more than $200 million, said Strand.
Enzo Biochem's shareholders have re-elected Gregory Bortz and Dov Perlysky to serve on the company's board of directors for three-year terms.
Bortz is founder and managing partner of Creo Capital Partners and he previously was senior VP of the Investment Banking Division of Lehman Brothers. Perlysky has been a managing member of the private investment firm Nesher and a director of the mutual fund Engex, and he has served on the board of directors at Pharma-Bio Serv and Highlands Bancorp.
Advanced Cell Diagnostics has named Evangeline Gonzalez to be its chief commercial officer. Gonzalez joins the molecular pathology company from Life Technologies, where she recently was chief marketing officer for its Life Sciences Division, and she previously was VP of market development and product management for several businesses within Life Technologies including Protein Analysis, Sequencing, and Molecular Biology Systems.
Meridian Bioscience shareholders have re-elected the members of its board of directors, including James Anderson, CEO John Kraeutler, Executive Chairman William Motto, and David Phillips, the company said this week in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Chamath Palihapitiya has joined Syapse's board of directors as part of a Series A round of venture capital funding. Palihapitiya is a founder of Social Capital, which led the funding round.
Lucy Shapiro has been awarded the National Medal of Science. Shapiro is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig professor of cancer research and director of the Beckman Center in the School of Medicine at Stanford University. She was a non-executive director of GlaxoSmithKline from 2001 to 2006 and is on the board of Gen-Probe and Pacific Biosciences. She is also a cofounder of Anacor Pharmaceuticals.
John Evans has resigned as a non-executive director of Healthlinx due to increasing work commitments elsewhere. In his place, the company has appointed Malcolm Lucas-Smith, who has been company secretary at Healthlinx since 2003 and will continue serving in that role.
Agendia has hired Neil Barth to be its chief medical officer. Barth has 35 years of experience as a physician and in genomic biomarker development, and he led a staff of 1,400 physicians at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, Calif.
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