At the ASMS’ 50th annual meeting last week in Orlando, Fl., the society awarded its 2002 Distinguished Contribution Award to William Henzel, John Stults, and Colin Watanabe of Genentech, based in South San Francisco, California. The award, given to recognize a focused, singular achievement in, or contribution to, fundamental or applied mass spectrometry, is for the trio’s implementation of peptide mass fingerprinting for the rapid identification of protein components. The three men proposed the idea of using peptide mass maps for sequence database searching in 1989, and the field has now widely adopted the practice.
The ASMS also awarded Ruedi Aebersold of the Institute for Systems Biology its Biemann Award, which recognizes significant achievements in basic or applied mass spectrometry made by individuals early in their career. In addition to developing the ICAT reagent technology for relative quantitation of protein expression, the society cited Aebersold’s contributions to LC/MS, LC/MS/MS, and capillary electrophoresis/MS, among numerous other achievements, as the basis for recognizing the ISB co-founder.
Lynx Therapeutics of Hayward, Calif., has promoted Kevin Corcoran to the position of president and chief executive officer, replacing Norrie Russell, who resigned from the company “to pursue other interests,” the company said. Prior to serving as Lynx’ vice president for operations, a position he has held for the last three years, Corcoran held technology development positions at Lynx, as well as both technical and managerial positions at Applied Biosystems.