Leroy Hood, president and cofounder of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Wash., has been awarded the BioMed SA 2011 Julio Palmaz award for innovation in healthcare and biosciences for his work in developing tools and technology that have advanced molecular biology, genomics, and medicine.
Hood was a developer of the automated DNA sequencer and also invented a number of other instruments for DNA and protein analysis. Additionally, he has played a key role in founding more than 13 biotechnology companies including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin, Rosetta Inpharmatics, and Integrated Diagnostics.
Elodie Ghedin, assistant professor in the department of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and an associate investigator at the J. Craig Venter Institute, was among 22 fellows named this week by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Ghedin uses genome sequencing to study human pathogens such as the parasites that cause leishmaniasis, sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, elephantiasis, and river blindness. As a MacArthur fellow, she will receive $500,000 in "no-strings-attached" funding over the next five years.
Ghedin holds a BS from McGill University, an MS from the University of Québec, and a PhD from McGill. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases between 1998 and 2000 and led the Viral Genomics group at the Institute for Genomic Research between 2000 and 2006.