Trevor Hawkins has been promoted to director of the US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. He replaces Elbert Branscomb, who has been named leader of a new DOE project called “Bringing the Genome to Life: Energy Related Biology in the New Genomic World.”
Branscomb will remain as a JGI advisor but his main responsibility will be to develop the Genome to Life program, which is aimed at developing the capability to understand and predict the behavior of single cells and multi-cellular organisms in response to biological and environmental signals.
Hawkins had been deputy director of the JGI since 1999 and was appointed division director of the newly established genomics division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in July.
Michael Waterman of Smith-Waterman algorithm fame has been appointed the first Celera Genomics fellow under a new program to recognize scientists in life sciences. Waterman and future fellows will conduct collaborative research with Celera scientists and engineers. He is currently an associate endowed professor of mathematics, biological sciences, and computer science at the University of Southern California.
Iconix Pharmaceuticals of Mountain View, Calif., has promoted Alan Roter to vice president, informatics. Kurt Jarnagin has been promoted to vice president, biological sciences and chemical genomics, and will lead the development of the company’s ChemExpress database system.
Roter will direct the ChemExpress infrastructure and integrated database development, as well as expand the company’s collection of expression array data mining and cheminformatics software programs.
Jarnagin will be responsible for experiment design, data generation, and chemical genomic content interpretation for the database.