Oxford Nanopore Technologies has hired former Solexa researchers John Milton and Clive Brown.
Milton joins the company as director of nanopore chemistry. Most recently, he was “closely involved” with a number of biotech startups. Previously, Milton was senior director of research at Solexa, which he joined in 2001. At Solexa, he was a principal architect of the sequencing-by-synthesis chemistry that formed the basis of the Genome Analyzer, now owned by Illumina. Prior to that, he held positions at GlaxoWellcome and Xenova. He holds a PhD in organic chemistry.
Brown is Oxford Nanopore’s director of bioinformatics and IT. He joins the company from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where he was a group leader in next-generation sequencing informatics R&D. Prior to that, he was director of computational biology and IT at Solexa. Brown has also held various management and consulting positions at GlaxoWellcome, Oxford Glycosciences, and other EU- and US-based organizations. He holds degrees in genetics and computational biology from the University of York.
Heinz Himmelbauer has joined the CRG Genomic Facility of the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, as head of the sequencing unit. He will be responsible for bioinformatics and method development, especially for new sequencing technologies. Himmelbauer joins CRG from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, where he headed the comparative and functional genomics group.
Lee Hood has joined the board of directors of bioinformatics company Geospiza. He is the president and co-founder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.