Kelly Frazer has become the founding chief of the Division of Genome Information Sciences of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. Previously, Frazer was a professor of molecular and experimental medicine at the Scripps Research Institute and director of genome biology at the Scripps Genomics Medicine Program at Scripps Health, where she established next-generation sequencing capabilities and sample prep methods for targeted sequencing studies. Prior to that, she was vice president of genomics at Perlegen Sciences. Frazer holds a PhD in genetics from the University of California, San Francisco, and undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biology from the University of California, San Cruz.
Mark Chaisson has joined Pacific Biosciences as a senior engineer in algorithms. Previously, he was a postdoc in Pavel Pevzner's group at the University of California, San Diego, where he worked on short-read assembly. He holds a PhD in bioinformatics and an undergraduate degree in computer science and chemistry from UCSD.
Halcyon Molecular, a startup working on electron microscopy-based DNA sequencing, has disclosed two of its scientific advisory board members on its website. On the firm's SAB are George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Ron Davis, a professor of biochemistry and genetics at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center.
Olink Bioscience has appointed Patrik Dahlén as chairman of its board of directors. Until recently, he was CEO of cancer diagnostics company Dako. Dahlén replaces Olink co-founder Ulf Landegren, who will remain on the company's board. Previously, Dahlén was CEO of Danish biotech company BioImage, and before that, president of life sciences and senior vice president at PerkinElmer.
David Haussler and James Kent have received the 2009 Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics. They are being honored for the development of the University of California Santa Cruz Genome Browser. Haussler is a professor of biomolecular engineering and the director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UCSC, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Kent is director of the UCSC Genome Browser project and a research scientist in the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering.