NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – CollabRx has appointed Paul Billings to its board of directors. Billings is a board certified internist and clinical geneticist and most recently served as chief medical officer for Life Technologies. He is executive chairman of Melanoma Diagnostics, a director of Trovagene, and a co-founder and past medical director of the Cordblood Registry. He was also a senior vice president for corporate development at Laboratory Corporation of America and a co-founder of Omicia.
He serves on the scientific advisory board of the US Food and Drug Administration, the Genomic Medicine Advisory Committee at the Department of Veteran Affairs, and the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Genomics.
Elaine Mardis and Rick Wilson have been named to endowed professorships at Washington University's School of Medicine. Mardis has been named the inaugural Robert E. and Louise F. Dunn Distinguished Professor of Medicine, and Wilson has been named the inaugural Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Medicine.
Mardis and Wilson are co-directors of the Genome Institute at Washington University. Both have played key roles in the Human Genome Project, the Cancer Genome Atlas project, the Human Microbiome Project, and the 1,000 Genomes Project.
HTG Molecular Diagnostics announced that Patrick Roche has joined the firm as its new senior VP for IVD assay development.
Roche comes to HTG from Ventana Medical Systems, where he was VP of translational diagnostics and led companion diagnostics development efforts with pharmaceutical partners. Before Ventana, Roche was director of the immunohistochemistry clinical lab at the Mayo Clinic.
Petra Kaufmann has joined the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences as head of its Division of Clinical Innovation, NCATS said this week. As part of her portfolio in the new post, Kaufmann will oversee the Clinical and Translational Science Awards program.
She currently is director of the Office of Clinical Research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, where she developed clinical research infrastructure, such as the NeuroNEXT research trial network, and the StrokeNET network. Before she joined NINDS in 2009, Kaufmann was a tenured associate professor of neurology at Columbia University, where she gained experience with the CTSA program by sitting on committees at the Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.
Molecular diagnostics firm CombiMatrix has hired Trilochan Sahoo as its new director of cytogenetics. Sahoo will report to Chief Medical Officer Wes Tyson. Before joining CombiMatrix, Sahoo was senior director of clinical cytogenetics at Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute.
Protea Biosciences has appointed Greg Kilby chief bioanalytics officer and director of biomolecular information services, and Erin Seeley senior scientist, mass spectrometry imaging.
Kilby previously worked at Thermo Fisher Scientific, where he was director of North America life sciences mass spectrometry application and demonstration laboratories. Before that he worked at Agilent Technologies and Pfizer.
Seeley formerly was director of the tissue imaging core laboratory at Vanderbilt University.
Epic Sciences said this week it has named Pascal Bamford VP of product development.
Bamford has 15 years of experience in developing automated diagnostic systems for digital pathology, and he previously was senior project leader for advanced staining assays at Ventana Medical Systems. He also was director of imaging at MonoGen, and he developed automated cytology imaging systems at CSSIP in Australia in collaboration with Accumed International.
The gene synthesis firm Gen9 has tapped Jennifer Camacho to be its chief legal and business counsel.
An IP attorney, Camacho previously was a partner at the law firm Greenberg Traurig, where she represented clients in synthetic biology, industrial biotechnology, protein engineering, pharmaceuticals, regenerative medicine, and related fields. She also previously was chief patent counsel at Proskauer Rose, and she was VP of IP at Codon Devices.
Insilico Medicine has appointed Qingsong Zhu to be chief operating officer.
Zhu was a research fellow at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, and he obtained his PhD at Kansas State University, where his research focused on insect genome sequencing. At Kimmel, he worked in the breast cancer program and in pediatric oncology, where he gathered experience in using microarrays and next-generation sequencing in biomarker and drug development.
XDx this week announced the appointment of Kenneth Ludlum as chief financial officer.
Ludlum most recently served as vice president and CFO of EndoGastric Solutions. He also previously served as CFO at several public companies, and is currently on the board of several private and public companies.
Somalogic said this week that it has named Dan Muehl its new chief financial officer.
Muehl was previously CFO of OPX Biotechnologies.
Before that he was vice president of finance at Pharmion, as well as CFO at firms including Repligen, Physiometrix, and Number Nine Visual Technology.
Opko Health said this week it has named Adam Logal senior vice president and chief financial officer, succeeding Juan Rodriguez, who will continue to consult for the company.
Logal was previously vice president, finance, and chief accounting officer at Opko.
The Institute of Molecular Biology has hired Miguel Andrade as a group leader to head its research on the role of genes and proteins in disease.
Andrade joins IMB from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, where he headed the computational biology and data mining group. He is also currently a professor in the biology department at Johannes Gutenberg University. Previously, he was an assistant professor in the University of Ottawa's department of medicine, and he led the bioinformatics group at the Ottawa Health Research Institute.
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