Michael Christman, the president and CEO of the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, has died, according to the institute.
Christman joined Coriell in 2007. During his tenure there, he launched the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative, which is studying how personal genomic information could be used in medical decision-making and clinical care in thousands of patients. The project also led the institute to spin off a for-profit pharmacogenomics company, Coriell Life Sciences, for which Christman served as chair of the board of directors.
"The importance of Dr. Christman's impact not only on the Coriell Institute, but personalized medicine as a whole cannot be overstated," Robert Kiep, III, the chairman of the Coriell Institute Board of Trustees, says in a statement. "It was his initiative that got this project off the ground and his guidance that turned it into the unequivocal success that it is today."
Christman also oversaw the establishment of the institute's Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell lab and the institute's partnership with Cellular Dynamics International to develop a biobank of human iPS cells.
Prior to joining the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, Christman was a professor at Boston University School of Medicine where he was the founding chair of the department of genetics and genomics.