NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Life Technologies has named Jay Therrien to the post of VP of global sales for next-generation sequencing. Therrien recently was director of sales for Asia Pacific and Japan at Illumina, which he joined in 2004 as a regional account manager.
He also has been a senior scientist and director of business development at ACGT, and as a specialist in technical support at Vysis and field application at Nanogen.
Cepheid has hired Nicolaas Arnold to be executive VP of worldwide commercial operations. Arnold previously was at Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, where he was regional VP for Northwest Europe and was responsible for molecular diagnostics, central lab, and point-of-care sales. Arnold also had served as VP of global marketing and US sales for Diagnostic Product Corporation, prior to that firm's acquisition by Siemens in 2006.
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins has been tapped by the Vatican to serve on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Benedict XVI. The academy is charged with promoting "the progress of the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences" and looking into epistemological problems, according to the Vatican's website. Other members of the 80-person academy include David Baltimore, Paul Berg, and Stephen Hawking.
Harold "Skip" Garner has been named executive director of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech.
He comes to VBI from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he was professor of biochemistry and internal medicine and the Philip O'Bryan Montgomery Jr., MD, Distinguished Chair in Developmental Biology.
Before that appointment in 1994, Garner was senior staff scientist and founder of the bioscience division at General Atomics in San Diego.
Genome Canada’s Founding President and CEO, Martin Godbout, is leaving his position after a decade to continue his involvement in genomics in the private sector. Genome Canada's board of directors has appointed a transition team to oversee and manage operations until a new president and CEO is appointed.
"I have been honored to work for a unique organization that represented the interests of the Canadian genomics and proteomics research community over the past 10 years," Godbout said in a statement this afternoon.
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