Gary Schroth has left his post as senior director for research development at Illumina to join WaferGen Biosystems as senior vice president of genomics research and applications, a new position in which he will help develop the company's real-time PCR technology and business.
At Illumina, he was responsible for research and development of gene expression applications for the firm's sequencing platform. Prior to that, he held various research and management roles at Applied Biosystems (now part of Life Technologies), Genelabs Technologies, and Gen-Probe. Schroth holds a PhD and a BS in biochemistry from the University of California at Davis.
Eric Schadt has been appointed to an external scientific panel for the Genotype-Tissue Expression, or GTEx, project launched last week by the National Institutes of Health. He is the chief scientific officer of Pacific Biosciences.
David Altshuler and Sydney Brenner are among 65 new members and four new foreign associates elected to the Institute of Medicine, bringing its total active membership to 1,649 and the number of foreign associates to 96. Established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences, the IOM is both an honorific membership organization and an advisory organization for health issues.
Altshuler is an associate professor in the departments of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School and an assistant molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Brenner, a Nobel laureate, is a senior distinguished fellow of the Crick-Jacobs Center at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, Calif.
Barney Saunders has left his post as chief commercial officer at IntegenX — formerly Microchip Biotechnologies — to take up the same position at NanoString Technologies, where he will be responsible for leading the development of the firm's business. Prior to IntegenX, he was vice president and general manager at Agilent Technologies, where he led the gene expression business unit. Before that, he spent 13 years at Amersham Biosciences, where he held a variety of commercial positions in the US and overseas. He holds a PhD and a BS in biological sciences from the University of Birmingham in the UK.
Han Cao, founder and chief scientific officer of BioNanomatrix, has won the Chinese Rising Star Entrepreneur award at the China International Economic and Technical Cooperation Forum in Beijing. The award recognizes his "entrepreneurial spirit and success" in founding the company and developing its single-molecule genomic analysis technology.