Rubicon Genomics has hired Karl Hecker as vice president of product development. Previously, he was a principal scientist at HTG Molecular Diagnostics. He has also held positions at Quidel, PerkinElmer, Invitrogen, and Transgenomic.
Cypher Genomics has formed a scientific advisory board to guide the development and implementation of its products. It has appointed Kelly Bethel, Michael Hultner, Myla Lai-Goldman, Arnold Levine, and Diego Miralles. Cypher's co-founder Nicholas Schork will chair the board.
Bethel is a practicing hematopathologist in the Scripps Clinic Medical Group and holds an adjunct appointment at the Scripps Research Institute. She is also the medical director of the Blood Bank at Scripps Clinic and Green Hospital.
Hultner is chief scientist for Lockheed Martin's Health and Life Sciences division where he manages a diverse portfolio of healthcare innovations, including big data analytics, population-scale genomics, and synthetic biology.
Lai-Goldman is CEO and co-founder of GeneCentric Diagnostics, which spun out from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She also spent more than 18 years at Laboratory Corporation of America, including as executive vice president, chief medical officer, and chief scientific officer.
Levine is a cancer research scientist and discovered the p53 tumor suppressor protein in 1979. He established the Simons Center for Systems Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Previously, he was president of the Rockefeller University, and prior to that he was the Harry C. Wiess Professor in Life Sciences and former chairman of the department of molecular biology at Princeton University.
Miralles is global head of innovation at Janssen and leads a group focused on integrating emerging technologies and partnerships in areas including genomics and clinical trials. He is also management sponsor of Janssen Labs and site head of the Janssen West Coast Research Center, part of Janssen Research & Development.
RainDance Technologies has named John Luckey as its new vice president of product development.
Luckey has held senior product and platform development positions at companies such as Roche NimbleGen, where he directed research and development activities for improving and expanding the company's core DNA microarray synthesis technology and related instrumentation; and MJ Research, where he contributed to the design and development of the Opticon product family and Opticon Monitor software. While at Roche, he also liaised with 454 Life Sciences development teams and participated on the global team tasked with defining a strategy to apply next-generation sequencing technology to clinical diagnostics.