The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences has named Chris Austin to be the first director of the new center, which launched at the beginning of the year and has so far been run by acting director Thomas Insel.
Austin began his National Institutes of Health career in 2002. Previously, he worked as a genomics researcher at Merck and as a senior advisor to the director for translational research at the National Human Genome Research Institute.
At NHGRI, Austin started the Knockout Mouse Project and the Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. He also served as director of the Therapeutics of Rare and Neglected Diseases program and the NIH Chemical Genomics Center and as scientific director of the NIH Center for Translational Therapeutics.