Mike Brophy
Natera has appointed Mike Brophy to the post of chief financial officer. He replaces Herm Rosenman, who resigned effective Jan. 31, 2017. Rosenman will join Natera's board of directors. Brophy had been serving as Natera's senior vice president of finance and investor relations since September 2016 and as the firm's vice president of corporate development and investor relations since September 2015. Prior to joining Natera, he was an executive director and vice president in Morgan Stanley's investment banking division.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier
CRISPR researchers Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology have been awarded the 2017 Japan Prize. The Japan Prize Foundation said it was honoring their work on "deciphering the molecular details of the type II bacterial immune system CRISPR/Cas and the creation of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system." The prize is awarded each year to researchers in two pre-selected fields. This year's fields were Life Science and Electronics, Information, and Communication.
James Wheless
CombiMatrix has appointed pediatric neurologist James Wheless to its scientific advisory board. Wheless is professor and chief of pediatric neurology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, and is director of the neurosciences institute and the comprehensive epilepsy program at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He is also a diplomat of the American Board of Pediatrics and the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology with special qualifications in child neurology, clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy, and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Neurology.
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.