Mark Stevenson has been promoted to the position of president and chief operating officer of Applied Biosystems and senior vice president of Applera, ABI’s parent corporation.
Stevenson was promoted in July to executive vice president, after serving 15 months as president of the Molecular and Cellular Biology Division. Concurrent with that promotion, ABI had split the MCB Division into two groups: MCB Systems and MCB Consumables.
Before taking over at the helm of the MCB division, Stevenson had been president of ABI’s Applied Markets division. He has been with the firm since 1998 and has held several management positions with the company.
Tony White, chairman, president, and CEO of Applera, has been serving as interim president of ABI since October 2006, when Cathy Burzik resigned.
The Bioinformatics Organization has named the candidates for the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award in Bioinformatics, which is presented annually by the members of the non-profit open source bioinformatics advocacy group "to an individual who has worked to promote open access to the materials and methods used in the field." This year’s nominees are: Philip Bourne, co-director of the Protein Data Bank at the University of California San Diego and co-founder and editor-in-chief of PLoS Computational Biology; James Edwards, developer of the Encyclopedia of Life at the Smithsonian Institution; Robert Gentleman, a developer of the R statistical package and the BioConductor open source microarray analysis package at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Michael Hucka, head of the Systems Biology Markup Language team at the California Institute of Technology; Francis Ouellette, a developer of open source bioinformatics software at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research; and Steven Salzberg, a developer of open source bioinformatics software at the University of Maryland, College Park.