Edison Liu was reelected president of the Human Genome Organisation by its governing body, the HUGO Council. Liu has been a council member of HUGO since 2003 and president since 2007.
Liu is the executive director of the Genome Institute of Singapore, a position he has held since 2001.
He received his BS in chemistry and psychology from Stanford University, where he also earned an MD. He then carried out an internship and residency in internal medicine at Washington University, St. Louis, and clinical cancer fellowships at Stanford and the University of California, San Francisco. His post-doc work was in the lab of Michael Bishop at the UCSF. Prior to joining GIS, he was on the faculty of medicine at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he developed programs in leukemia and breast cancer research centering on molecular epidemiology and cell signaling.
Caliper Life Sciences formed a scientific advisory board intended to aid its efforts to generate automated sample-preparation protocols for next-generation sequencing platforms. The board includes: Michael Quail from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute; Vincent Magrini from the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center; Patrick Cahill from the Broad Institute; Christopher Detter and Jan Fang Cheng from the US Department of Energy's Join Genome Institute; and John Gill and Karen Beeson from the J. Craig Venter Institute.
As part of a $7 million Series B investment round led by Stata Venture Partners (see In Sequence 2/23/2010), NABsys has added Ray Stata, founder of Stata Venture Partners, to its board of directors.
Stata is also the founder and chairman of the semiconductor company Analog Devices.
Raynard Kington is leaving his position as deputy director of the National Institutes of Health to accept the position of president at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, beginning in July.
Kington joined the NIH in 2000 as director of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, and then served as acting director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Since February 2003, he has served as the principal deputy director of the NIH.
From November 2008 until August 2009, he served as acting NIH director. In this position, he led the effort to allocate more than $10 billion in NIH funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and implemented President Obama's executive order on embryonic stem cell research.