Precision for Medicine has hired Eric Perakslis to take on the role of senior adviser, bioinformatics, and information technology. In this role, he will provide strategic and scientific guidance to Precision's leadership team in the development, acquisition, and execution of bioinformatics and health information technology products and services.
In addition to his role at Precision, Perakslis is the executive director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Biomedical Informatics and its Library of Medicine. Prior to that, he was chief information officer and chief scientist, informatics at the US Food and Drug Administration. He has also held multiple executive leadership positions at Johnson & Johnson.
Eric has a PhD in chemical and biochemical engineering from Drexel University and also holds B.S.Che and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering.
The International Society for Computational Biology has appointed Alfonso Valencia and Thomas Lengauer as president-elect and vice president respectively.
Valencia is the group leader of the structural computational biology group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center. He is an ISCB Fellow and has been involved with the leadership of the organization since its international expansion in 2002. He currently serves on its board of directors and chairs several of its committees. He will begin serving as president-elect in January 2014 and will begin a three-year term as president in 2015.
Lengauer is the director of the computational biology and applied algorithms group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. He has been involved with ISCB since the late 1990s and is a member of its board of directors. He will serve as vice president starting January 2014 for a three-year term.
The ISCB has also announced the newly elected officials of the ISCB student council who will take the helm in 2014.
Darbha Anupama Jigisha, from the University of Geneva and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, will chair the group; Umesh Nandal from the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam is the vice-chair; Esmeralda Vicedo from the Technical University of Munich will be the treasurer; Tomas Di Domenico from the University of Padova, Italy will be the secretary; and Avinash Kumar Shanmugam from the University of Michigan will be the council's representative to the ISCB board of directors.