Sequenom announced the appointment of William Welch to the position of senior VP of diagnostics. Welch will report to Harry Hixson, CEO of Sequenom.
Previously, Welch was senior VP and chief commercial officer of Monogram Biosciences. Before that, he held various leadership roles in La Jolla Pharmaceuticals, Dade Behring MicroScan, and Abbott Laboratories.
As part of his hiring package, Welch will receive a nonqualified stock option grant for 150,000 shares of common stock. According to Sequenom, the option has an exercise price of $7.70, equal to the closing price of Sequenom's common stock on January 7, 2011, the date Welch's employment started. The option will become exercisable over four years and expire after ten years.
On Jan. 3, Dean Schorno became chief financial officer of Genomic Health, the company announced in an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Schorno will assume the CFO duties previously conducted by Brad Cole, who will remain the company's chief operating officer and secretary.
Schorno previously served as Genomic Health's senior VP of finance from February 2010 to his appointment as CFO. Before joining Genomic Health in 2001, Schorno founded and headed an accounting and consulting firm.
BioMarker Strategies has named Samuel Broder, Mark Velleca, and Paul Beresford to its board of directors. Broder was VP and CMO at Celera for a dozen years, and he is a former director of the National Cancer Institute. Velleca founded and was VP of CGI Pharmaceuticals. Beresford currently is VP of business development at Biodesix, and he formerly was VP of translational diagnostics at Ventana Medical Systems.
Ohio University and the National Academy of Engineering have awarded the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize to Leroy Hood, who will receive the $500,000 award for his genome sequencing efforts. Hood is president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology and was a co-founder of Applied Biosystems. He has won several scientific awards throughout his career, including the 1987 Lasker Award and the 2002 Kyoto Prize.