Personalized Cancer Therapy (Perthera), a precision cancer therapy firm, has hired Subha Madhavan to serve as chief data officer. In this role, she will be responsible for strategic planning and for developing the organization's data analytic framework, data standards, as well as quality control of data. Among other things, she will work closely with the company's chief information officer to on improvements to the Perthera Expert System.
Madhavan is the director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics at the Georgetown University Medical Center, an associate professor of oncology at the university, and co-director of the Lombardi Cancer Center's Biostatistics and Bioinformatics shared resource. She has an MS in information technology from the University of Maryland and a PhD in molecular biology and biological sciences from the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences.
Champions Oncology has hired Ido Ben-Zvi to serve as its director of bioinformatics and machine learning. He will be responsible for using the data in the company's TumorBank to support its Translational Oncology solutions that are offered to pharmaceutical companies.
Prior to joining Champions Oncology, Ben-Zvi was a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research. In this capacity, he led the development of a system to analyze large amounts of data related to the search engine Bing. Before that, he held multiple positions with Frontline PCB Solutions in software engineering, algorithm development, and data mining. He has also worked on software and algorithm development at Celltrex, Zapper, and Technomatix.
He received his doctorate in computer science from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, a master's degree in cognitive sciences from Tel Aviv University, and his bachelor's degree is from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
CollabRx has tapped Clifford Baron to serve as chief operating officer. In this role, he will lead the company's efforts to develop and commercialize its Genetic Variant Annotation service and Therapy Finder products.
Prior to moving to CollabRx, Baron held several positions at Accelrys including director of biology product marketing, director of business development, and director of professional services. He founded Lexigraphix, a strategy consultancy that served biotechnology startups and prior to that he was the senior director of global solutions for Applied Biosystems — now part of Life Technologies/Thermo Fisher. He was also director of product management at Pangea Systems / Doubletwist and held a number of positions at Abacus Concepts — now owned by SAS Corp.
He holds a BS in Biology from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.