Stratos Genomics has appointed Tim Hunkapiller to its science advisory board. Hunkapiller is a co-inventor of Sanger sequencing technology. He is the co-founder, president, and chief scientific officer of Discovery Biosciences and a faculty member at the University of Washington. He holds a PhD from California Institute of Technology in molecular biology.
Svante Pääbo has been chosen as winner of the 2013 Genetics Prize of the Gruber Foundation, which includes a $500,000 award.
Pääbo, who is director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, won the award for his efforts in the field of molecular paleontology, in which he uses genomics technologies and approaches to study prehistoric life.
Most recently, he has led projects that use next-generation sequencing to analyze ancient genomes, and has published a draft genome of the Neandertal.
Before joining Max Planck, Pääbo worked at the University of Uppsala, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Munich.
The new Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, sponsored by Genentech's Art Levinson, Google's Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki from 23andMe, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Yuri Milner, the founder of Mail.ru Group, has been awarded to 11 scientists.
The winners, who each receive $3 million, include Rockefeller University's Cornelia Bargmann; David Botstein at Princeton University; Lewis Cantley from Weill Cornell Medical College; the Hubrecht Institute's Hans Clevers; Napoleone Ferrara at the University of California, San Diego; Titia de Lange, also at Rockefeller; the Broad Institute's Eric Lander; Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's Charles Sawyers; Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center; MIT's Robert Weinberg; and Shinya Yamanaka from Kyoto University.