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People in the News: Sekar Kathiresan, Pablo Cagoni, and more

Sekar Kathiresan

The Center for Human Genetic Research (CHGR) at Massachusetts General Hospital has appointed Sekar Kathiresan as its director. He is replacing CHGR’s founding director, James Gusella. Kathiresan is currently a member of the CHGR faculty, and is the Ofer and Shelly Nemirovsky MGH Research Scholar. He is also a member of the Broad Institute, and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Kathiresan has led the Preventative Cardiology section within the Cardiology Division at Mass General since 2005.


Pablo Cagnoni and Tony Coles

CRISPR Therapeutics has added Pablo Cagnoni to its board of directors and has named Tony Coles chairman of the board. Cagnoni currently serves as CEO of Tizona Therapeutics and executive chairman of Blade Therapeutics. Prior to that, he held executive positions at Onyx Pharmaceuticals and Novartis Oncology. Cagnoni holds an MD from the University of Buenos Aires School of Medicine. Coles joined CRISPR Therapeutics’ board in 2015 and succeeds Bradley Bolzon, managing director of Versant Ventures and founding chairman since 2013.


Itai Yanai

Itai Yanai has been named the inaugural director of the newly created Institute for Computational Medicine at New York University's Langone Medical Center. He'll step into the role officially on May 1. Yanai will also be a professor in NYU School of Medicine's department of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology. Yanai joins NYU Langone from the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology where he was a faculty member in the biology department. His research focuses on gene regulation and combines experimental approaches in embryology, molecular biology, and computational biology. He has a PhD in bioinformatics from Boston University.


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.

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