OAKLAND, Calif.--Douglas Brutlag has been appointed acting chief scientific officer of Pangea Systems. He will remain a full-time professor of biochemistry and medicine and director of the bioinformatics resource at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Brutlag, who has been a scientific advisor to Pangea since 1997, said that as CSO he will monitor the scientific integ-rity of the company's programs and approaches and initiate in-house scientific research goals employing Pangea's tools. He is also expected to form research collaborations with some of the company's customers. Brutlag told BioInform he wants "to ensure the scientific validity of the methods that are being used," and added, "I'd like to bring Pangea closer to its clients and to its customers by applying the tools to real-world problems inhouse."
Stanford encourages its faculty to work or consult one day a week outside the university, Brutlag said, noting that the many parallels between Stanford's and Pangea's bioinformatics efforts make the arrangement particularly useful. Brutlag's research group at Stanford develops new bioinformatics methods, some of which have been licensed by Pangea.
He also sees synergies in his role as director of the bioinformatics resource, which provides access to databases and bioinformatics tools to over 1,000 molecular biologists in 100 research groups in 35 different departments at the university. "Some of the tools that we'd like to provide to help people do their research here at Stanford are some of the Pangea tools," he said.
--Matthew Dougherty