Ariadne has hired David Thorpe, John Clouston, and Leonard Keenan to expand its North American and European sales teams. Clouston joins Ariadne as sales manager in the North American market. He recently held a similar position at Silicon Genetics (now the GeneSpring group at Agilent Technologies). Thorpe has been appointed director of enterprise sales and will lead corporate and enterprise sales efforts in North America and Europe. He previously held senior-level positions at OriGene Technologies, CambridgeSoft, and InforMax (now Invitrogen). Keenan serves as business development associate for the European market. He previously held business development and sales management positions at a variety of software companies, Ariadne said.
Robert Langer, institute professor in chemical and biomedical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has joined the Accelrys NanoBiology Initiative’s scientific advisory committee. Langer joins initiative chair Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology, as the second member of the committee.
Lawrence Fogel, president of Natural Selection, was awarded the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Technical Field Award at the 2006 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence on July 19. The award is named in honor of Frank Rosenblatt, considered one of the founders of neural networks, and is presented for “outstanding contributions to the advancement of the design, practice, techniques or theory in biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms,” according to IEEE. Fogel founded Natural Selection in 1993. The company combines evolutionary computation with neural networks, fuzzy systems, and other computational intelligence technologies to address problems in bioinformatics and other areas.
Text-mining software firm Linguamatics has appointed John Brimacombe as executive chairman. Brimacombe has founded several software businesses, including Jobstream Group and Mforma Group (now Hands-On Mobile).