Warren Kocmond and Marc Haugen
Cepheid has promoted Warren Kocmond to the position of president and chief operating officer. Kocmond was formerly executive vice president and COO. Kocmond's responsibilities will now include global commercial operations in addition to manufacturing operations, technical service, and customer service.
In addition, Cepheid has appointed Marc Haugen as executive vice president of engineering and operations, reporting to Kocmond. Haugen was most recently group vice president of worldwide operations and supply chain at Applied Materials.
Helix Scientific Advisory Board
Helix has appointed seven inaugural members to its newly formed scientific advisory board: Goncalo Abecasis, Atul Butte, Nita Farahany, Judy Garber, Robert Green, Keith Stewart, and Spencer Wells.
- Abecasis is a Felix E. Moore collegiate professor of biostatistics, and chair of the department of biostatistics at the University of Michigan.
- Butte is a professor of pediatrics, and director of the Institute of Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.
- Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy, director of Duke Sciences & Society at Duke University, and a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
- Garber is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and director at the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
- Green, who will serve as the board's chair, is an associate professor of medicine and director of the Genomes2People research program at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is also an associate member of the Broad Institute.
- Stewart is the Carlson and Nelson endowed Director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine, and the Vasek and Anna Maria Polak professor of cancer research.
- Wells is a population geneticist, author, and entrepreneur. He is also co-founder and chief product officer of Embark Veterinary, and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Jeff Huber
Grail has appointed Jeff Huber as CEO. Over the past two years, Huber served as an executive at Google X, where he focused on life science projects in big data and informatics. He also served as a member of Illumina's board of directors from 2014 to 2016. Previously, Huber led the development of large-scale systems at Google, eBay, and Excite@Home.
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.