Kathy Ordoñez
RainDance Technologies has appointed Kathy Ordoñez as chairman of its board of directors. She has served on the RainDance board of directors since 2014, and as the chair of the board's science and innovation committee. Prior to RainDance, Ordoñez was senior vice president at Quest Diagnostics. She joined Quest as part of its acquisition of Celera in 2011. Ordoñez was previously CEO at Celera and a founder of Celera Diagnostics. Earlier in her career, she held several senior positions at Hoffmann La-Roche, overseeing the formation of Roche Molecular Systems.
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Emmanuelle Charpentier is joining the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology on Oct. 1 as scientific director, where she will set up a new department within the institute. She is a co-inventor of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology. Charpentier has been a professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Resarch and Hannover Medical School and at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine at Umeå University.
Stephen Kingsmore
Rady Pediatric Genomics and Systems Medicine Institute at Rady Children's Hospital named Stephen Kingsmore the institute's president and CEO. Kingsmore, who developed the 50-hour genome — a process by which physicians can decode and interpret a newborn baby's genome in two days — joins Rady from Children's Mercy Kansas City, where he was the founding director of the Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine. He begins his new position at Rady's on Sept. 28.
Balaji Venkateswaran
DNAnexus has appointed Balaji Venkateswaran as chief technology officer. Most recently he was co-founder and vice president of engineering at Layer8 Security. Prior to Layer8, he held various management and executive positions at Symantec, GuardianEdge Technologies; which was acquired by Symantec; Elemental Cyber Security; and Evolve Software, now part of Oracle.
For more recent items on executive appointments and promotions in the omics and molecular diagnostics industries, please see the People in the News page on our website.