Robert McBurney, Paul Stroobant, Pierre Chretien, Thomas Klopack

Robert McBurney has become CSO and senior vice president for R&D at Waltham, Mass-based Beyond Genomics. He joins the company from Differential Proteomics, a company he co-founded and where he was president and CEO. Prior to that, he was president of CeNeS Pharmaceuticals and CSO, later president, of Cambridge NeuroScience. He also held a number of academic positions, including that of an assistant director of the Medical Research in the UK. He holds a BSc and a PhD from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Paul Stroobant has joined Beyond Genomics as vice president for biochemistry and chemistry. He is also a co-founder of Differential Proteomics, where he was CSO. Before that, he held positions at Cell Genesys and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. He received a PhD in biochemistry from the Australian National University in Canberra.

Pierre Chretien has been appointed by Austin, Texas-based Pure Protein to be responsible for the company’s marketing and business development efforts in Canada. Prior to this, he held various positions, including CTO and VP for operations and clinical genomics, at SignalGene. He was formerly product development manager at Visible Genetics and held various positions in application development and technical support at Pharmacia Biotech.

Thomas Klopack has become CEO of Aclara BioSciences and has joined the company’s board of directors. He used to be chief operating officer of Aurora Biosciences, prior to its acquisition by Vertex Pharmaceuticals last year. Before that, he held various management positions at Raychem, most recently as director of strategic planning and business development of the electronics division. Klopack holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University.