Elaine Mardis and Rick Wilson have been named to endowed professorships at Washington University's School of Medicine. Mardis has been named the inaugural Robert E. and Louise F. Dunn Distinguished Professor of Medicine, and Wilson has been named the inaugural Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Medicine.
Mardis and Wilson are codirectors of the Genome Institute at Washington University. Both played key roles in the Human Genome Project, the Cancer Genome Atlas project, the Human Microbiome Project, and the 1,000 Genomes Project.
Ewan Birney, associate director and senior scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute, has been appointed as interim head of the newly launched Center for Therapeutic Target Validation, a public-private research initiative between GlaxoSmithKline, EMBL-EBI, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Birney is one of the founders of the Ensembl genome browser and other databases, and has played a key role in many large-scale genomics projects, including the Human Genome Project in 2000 and the ENCODE project. His research group currently focuses on genomic algorithms and inter-individual differences in humans and other species.