Illumina has appointed Matt Posard to senior vice president and general manager of its newly created Translational and Consumer Genomics business segment (IS 1/10/2012). Posard was previously Illumina's vice president of global sales. Before joining the company, he served as regional sales director and director of marketing at Biosite, and has also held marketing positions at Gen-Probe. He holds a BA in quantitative economics and decision science from the University of California, San Diego.
Gene Robinson will head the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois. He has been the interim head since March 2011 and before that was leader of its research group on the genomics of neural and behavioral plasticity. He is also the Swanlund Chair in the department of entomology, is on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Study, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Previously, he was director of the University of Illinois's neuroscience program. He holds a PhD in entomology from Cornell University.
Kevin McKernan has joined Courtagen Life Sciences as chief scientific officer after the firm acquired Medicinal Genomics last month, whose founder and CEO he was.
Until last summer, McKernan was vice president and director of R&D at Life Technologies, where he managed the development of the SOLiD sequencing technology. Prior to that, he was the co-founder, president, and CSO of Agencourt Personal Genomics, which was acquired by Applied Biosystems in 2006. Earlier, he co-founded Agencourt Biosciences, where he was CSO until it was acquired by Beckman Coulter in 2005.