Eric Green has been appointed as director of the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute. Green, who is currently the NHGRI scientific director and director of the NHGRI Division of Intramural Research, will assume his new post on Dec. 1.
Alan Guttmacher, NHGRI's deputy director, had been serving as acting director of the institute since former director Francis Collins , now NIH director, stepped down last year.
At NHGRI, Green founded and directed the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center. He also established the Social and Behavioral Research Branch and the NIH Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health.
In addition, he has been chief of the Genome Technology Branch and head of its Physical Mapping Section. He also established a program in comparative genomics that involves analyzing sequences from targeted genomic regions in evolutionarily diverse species. Furthermore, he has been leading a number of efforts that use large-scale DNA sequencing to study genomic variation among humans, especially those contributing to common diseases. He is also involved in an NIH-based consortium that aims to understand the microbial communities that exist on human skin and how they contribute to health and disease.
Chung-Fan Chiou is the founding chief technical officer and Hubert Renauld is a senior scientist and secretary of Cracker, a team of researchers based at the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Hsinchu, Taiwan, that is working on a single-molecule real-time DNA sequencing technology (see article in this issue).
Chiou is the former president and chief technology officer of Phalanx Biotech Group, a microarray spin-off from ITRI. He was also the project leader on ITRI's biochip project. Chiou holds a PhD in environmental engineering from Purdue University and an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.
Renauld is a former researcher of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. After that, he worked as a consultant for cross-disciplinary and applied bioinformatics projects. He holds a PhD for research on yeast telomeric silencing that he carried out at the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at Gembloux in Belgium.
In connection with Microchip Biotechnologies' recent Series B financing round (see article in this issue), Jim Blair, a partner at lead investor Domain Associates, and Bill Byun, managing director of investor Samsung Ventures America, will join MBI's board of directors.