NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has appointed Jackie Hunter to be its chief executive, UK Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts said this week.
Hunter currently is chief executive of OI Pharma Partners. She formerly led GlaxoSmithKline's external science management strategy as head of science environment development, which entailed building public-private research initiatives.
She also previously served on the BBSRC Council and Strategy Board, where she led a number of BBSRC initiatives, panels, and visiting groups.
SQI Diagnostics said this week that it has promoted Andrew Morris to be company CEO and president, effective June 17.
The company also has promoted Claude Ricks to be chairman of the firm's board of directors, replacing Eric Schneider, who will continue to serve as a director on the board and on the audit and special committees.
Morris has been SQI Diagnostics' chief financial officer since 2004, and before that he was VP of mergers at Ernst and Young Corporate Finance.
Singulex has named Guido Baechler president and CEO. Baechler takes over from outgoing Singulex CEO Philippe Goix.
Baechler was previously senior vice president of operations at Singulex. Before joining the company in 2008, he held leadership positions at Roche Diagnostics.
Agendia has appointed Peter Schineller to be its chief commercial officer, a new position. Schineller formerly was senior VP and CCO at Alexza Pharmaceuticals, and before that he was senior VP and GM at Ventana Medical Systems.
He also previously was senior VP of sales, marketing, and commercial operations at Genoptix Medical Laboratories, a co-founder of Verus Pharmaceuticals, and a captain in the US Marine Corps.
GenMark Diagnostics said this week that it has tapped Jon Kayyem, its founder and current chief scientific officer, to serve as senior VP of R&D, replacing Jorge Garces, who has resigned to pursue other opportunities.
Kayyem previously has filled in as company president and CEO for a stint in 2010, and he formerly held those posts at Osmetech.
Atossa Genetics said this week that Peter Carbonaro has joined the firm as senior VP of operations, a newly created position.
Carbonaro formerly was VP of operations at Ondine Biomedical, and he spent about five years each at Gilead Sciences and Corus Pharma, which was acquired by Gilead.
He launched his career at Roche Diagnostic Systems, where he was production manager, senior group leader, and associate scientist.
Vermillion's board of directors has promoted Eric Schoen to be VP of finance, effective immediately.
Schoen will continue to serve in his current post as company chief accounting officer, which he has held since 2011.
SRA International has tapped John Greene to serve as its senior director of bioinformatics.
Greene has been with SRA since late 1999 and has been its director of bioinformatics since 2001. He is also an adjunct faculty teaching bioinformatics at Johns Hopkins University and president, chief scientific officer, and co-founder of Complexigen, a bioinformatics consulting and services firm.
Prior to working for SRA, Greene was a bioinformatics senior staff scientist at Gene Logic, a bioinformatics scientist at Human Genome Sciences, and a senior scientist at Genetic Medisyn.
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine investigator Stephanie Fraley has won the $500,000 Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interfaces. The award provides funding to new PhDs over five years to support their transitions from postdoc to faculty.
Fraley, a postdoc fellow in emergency medicine, infectious disease, and biomedical engineering, is working to develop a lab-on-chip microfluidic technology that could identify the genetic material of bacteria in immune cells, enabling diagnosis and guided treatment for sepsis.
The first two years of Fraley's award will fund postdoctoral training and the final three will support her academic career.
Pål Nyrén was named one of the European Patent Office's Inventors of the Year for his development of DNA pyrosequencing technology.
Nyrén was one of five winners of the 2013 European Inventor Award, from a group of 15 total nominees from 11 countries. He is currently a professor of biochemistry at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in the Netherlands. Previously, he founded the company Biotage and was an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Stockholm. He holds a PhD from the University of Stockholm.
Bradley Evans has joined the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center as director of its Proteomics and Mass Spectrometry facility.
Evans formerly was at the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was in charge of administration of the scientific core and providing access to instrumentation, experimental design, training, and sample analysis.
Accelrys' shareholders have re-elected Chris van Ingen to continue to serve on the company's board of directors until the firm's 2016 meeting.
Van Ingen recently retired as president of Agilent Technologies' Bio-Analytical Measurement business, and he previously held a number of positions at Agilent.
Illumina has elected Gerald Möller and David Walt to its board of directors for a three-year term, until its annual meeting of stockholders in 2016.
The firm has also elected Robert Epstein to its board for one year, until the annual meeting of stockholders in 2014.
The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, the quasi-public agency that is implementing a $1 billion initiative, has added seven new members to serve on is scientific advisory board, bringing the total number of MLSC scientific advisers to 24.
The new SAB members include:
Kevin Bitterman, a principal at Polaris Ventures and co-founder of Genoea Biosciences;
Glenn Gaudette; an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute;
José-Carlos Gutiérrez-Ramos, senior VP of Worldwide Bioetherapeutics Research and Development at Pfizer;
Henry Kay, an investor at Boston Harbor Angels and the Boston-Haifa Life Sciences Connection;
Judith Lieberman, senior investigator at Children's Hospital Boston and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School;
Barbara Osborne, a professor of veterinary and animal sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst;
and Guillermo Tearney, a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
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