Susan Lindquist has been appointed director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Lindquist currently serves as a professor in the department of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago. She succeeds Whitehead’s two previous directors, Nobel laureate David Baltimore and yeast genetics pioneer Gerald Fink, who will step down in October as director of Whitehead after serving 10 years — the most allowed in this position.
In conjunction with her Whitehead appointments, Lindquist will also become a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She will bring about ten members of her lab with her to Whitehead and plans to recruit several others once she arrives at the institute on October 15.
Karl Voelkerding, a board-certified clinical pathologist and an executive at consulting firm Gene Insight, has been appointed to the scientific board of EraGen Biosciences. The company, based in Madison, Wis., said Voelkerding is one of several new external members who are providing consulting expertise as EraGen accelerates the commercialization of its nucleic acid and bioinformatics technologies.
EraGen also announced that it has been awarded a $750,000 Phase II grant from the National Institutes of Health to refine and further develop its Master Catalog data mining and analysis platform.
The company will also use the grant to develop tools to exploit probabilistic ancestral sequences for both protein/protein and DNA/protein alignments. EraGen said these tools would be able to detect distant homologs, identify errors across sequence databases, and augment current approaches to gene finding.
Psychiatric Genomics of Gaithersburg, Md., has appointed Richard Chipkin as CEO. Chipkin joins the company from the global business development group at Schering-Plough.