Geospiza has elected Leroy Hood, president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology, to its board of directors. In a statement, the company explained that Hood will continue to “shape our thinking” and strengthen its marketing position as it creates solutions to handle the output of second-generation sequencers.
Hood co-developed the first automated DNA sequencer while he was at the California Institute of Technology. He co-founded ISB in 2000 and has also played a role in founding more than 14 biotechnology companies, including Amgen and Applied Biosystems.
Among other awards, Hood has received the Biotechnology Heritage Award and the Heinz Award in Technology, and is a member of the National Academies of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.
Oxford Nanopore Technologies has appointed Clive Brown as director of bioinformatics and IT. John Milton has also joined the firm to direct nanopore chemistry.
Brown comes to Oxford Nanopore from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he developed informatics for next-generation DNA sequencing platforms. Previously, he was at director of computational biology and IT at Solexa, which was acquired by Illumina in January 2007.
In addition to the development of the Genome Analyzer, Brown's team built Solexa's high-performance computing infrastructure, providing the software tools, core algorithms, and data needed for product adoption.
Brown has held various management and consulting positions at EU- and US-based organizations, among them GlaxoWellcome and Oxford Glycosciences.
Milton was previously senior director of research at Solexa, where he was the principal architect of the sequencing-by-synthesis chemistry that formed the basis of the Genome Analyzer. Previously he was at GlaxoWellcome and Xenova, where he specialized in designing new chemical systems that interact with the biological machinery of genetic processing.