Peter Covitz, chief operating officer for the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Bioinformatics, will leave the NCI at the end of February to join MDS Nordion as senior vice president of Innovation. MDS Nordion is a mid-sized nuclear medicine biotech based in Ottawa, Canada.
Covitz worked at the NCICB for six years and played an instrumental role in launching the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid project. In a statement posted on the caBIG listserv this week, Kenneth Buetow, director of the NCICB, said that Covitz was “invaluable in guiding many aspects of the initiative — from its core infrastructure to its management, and many components in between.”
Buetow said that Covitz’s caBIG duties will be assigned to “interim point people,” who will be disclosed later.
Authentication software firm BioPassword has appointed Matthew Shanahan as senior vice president of marketing and strategy. Shanahan most recently served as chief marketing officer for Teranode. Prior to that, he was a product manager at Documentum, where he spent 10 years before the company was acquired by EMC. Before that, Shanahan was a manager at Accenture specializing in advanced enterprise architectures for Global 500 companies.