NextBio has appointed Sergio Gurrieri as senior director of business development. In this position he will be "identifying new growth opportunities and strategic business development initiatives," the company said.
NextBio implements its product as a software-as-a-service to let scientists search directly or via internal company sites through the NextBio Application Programming Interface.
Prior to joining NextBio, Gurrieri was group marketing manager at Millipore, where he led the development and execution of Millipore's global eBusiness strategies covering a portfolio of 25,000 products.
Prior to Millipore, he was in research and development, business development, and marketing roles at Invitrogen and BD Biosciences Clontech. He holds an MBA in management and marketing from San Diego State University, and a PhD in biophysical chemistry from the University of Oregon.
Computer scientist Wu-chun Feng at Virginia Tech's College of Engineering computer science and electrical and engineering departments and Ali Butt, also of the computer science department, have received IBM Faculty Awards.
Feng was honored for his work in large-scale bioinformatics and computational biology. He directs the Systems, Networking & Renaissance Grokking, or SyNeRGy, Laboratory at Virginia Tech. He has worked on high-performance networking protocols and is optimizing several genomic sequence search tools, including mpiBlast for massively parallel computer architectures like IBM's Blue Gene and Cell Broadband Engine.
Before joining Virginia Tech as a member of the faculty, he spent six years as a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Ali Butt received the award for his work on application-tailored distributed computing. His research areas are operating systems, distributed systems, file and storage systems, grid environments, peer-to-peer systems, and self-organizing systems. At Virginia Tech he directs the Distributed Systems & Storage Laboratory.
The IBM Faculty Awards Program is intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development, and service organizations.