NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Francis deSouza has been named president of Illumina. In his new role, deSouza will report to CEO Jay Flatley and will lead the San Diego company's business units. He will also join Illumina's executive management team.
DeSouza will join Illumina in December. He currently serves as president of products and services at Symantec, which he joined after Symantec acquired Imlogic, a company he co-founded and led as CEO. DeSouza was also the co-founder and CEO of Flash Communications, which Microsoft acquired in 1998. Following that acquisition, deSouza worked at Microsoft and was responsible for the development of the company's enterprise real-time collaboration offerings.
Qiagen said this week that it has formed an Ingenuity Scientific Advisory Board to help guide the development of its clinical interpretation and reporting solutions.
Members of the SAB include Doug Basset, CTO and CSO at Qiagen, who will chair the board; Sherri Bale, managing director and cofounder of GeneDx and senior vice president of BioReference Laboratories; Hakon Hakonarson, director of the Center for Applied Genomics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; Madhuri Hegde, executive director of Emory Genetics Laboratory; Elaine Mardis, co-director of the Genome Institute at Washington University; Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mt. Sinai Hospital; and Jay Shendure, associate professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington.
George Weinstock has joined the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Conn., where he will be a professor and associate director for microbial genomics.
A leader of the Human Microbiome Project and a metagenomics expert with a wide-ranging background in large-scale genome sequencing projects, Weinstock joins Jackson Lab from Washington University, where he was associate director of the Genome Institute. He also was co-director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center and a professor of molecular genetics at Baylor College of Medicine. Weinstock also was a leader of the Human Genome Project, and in 1998 he co-led one of the first bacterial genome sequencing efforts.
The Jackson Lab for Genomic Medicine is currently housed at the UConn Health Center campus while a permanent facility is under construction.
The National Human Genome Research Institute has named Lawrence Brody to be the first director of its new Division of Genomics and Society division.
Brody currently is chief of NHGRI's Genome Technology Branch and is chief scientific officer of the trans-NIH Center for Inherited Disease Research.
The new NHGRI division was established in 2012 under the institute's reorganization, and it incorporated and will extend the activities of the NHGRI Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications research program. It is responsible for addressing societal issues that are relevant to genomics research and genomic biomedical advances.
Brody joined NHGRI in 1993 as a senior staff fellow, and he became head of the Molecular Pathogenesis Section in the Genome Technology Branch in 2001. Before he joined NHGRI, Brody was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Associate and an HHMI postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Michigan.
Greg Schiffman will join StemCells, a cell-based therapeutics and stem cell-based R&D firm, as CFO and executive VP of finance.
Schiffman, who previously held financial executive posts at Affymetix and Applied Biosystems, most recently was executive VP and CFO of Dendreon. He will succeed Rodney Young and will take on the position at the beginning of 2014.
Utrecht University said this week it has appointed Alexander Makarov to be a professor of high resolution mass spectrometry at the Bijvoet Center of the Department of Chemistry.
Makarov, who is director of global research and life science mass spectrometry for Thermo Fisher Scientific, will fill a new chair position that was created to advance new applications for analyzing large protein assemblies using Orbitrap technology. Makarov led the team that developed the technology, and his appointment as the new chair is part of an effort to strengthen research ties between Thermo Fisher's LSMS team and the Utrecht proteomics group.
BG Medicine said this week that its board of directors has named Stephen Hall to be its executive VP and chief financial officer. He will replace Charles Abdalian, who has been the company's CFO since 2012.
Hall formerly was CFO at Helicos BioSciences, and he most recently was VP of finance, treasurer, and principal financial and chief accounting officer at Stemline Therapeutics.
Genetic Technologies said this week that Tommaso Bonvino has withdrawn his name as a candidate for re-election to the company's board of directors. Bonvino withdrew his name for personal reasons, GTG said. He will cease to be a director as of the company's annual shareholder meeting on Nov. 29.
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