Sequenom has appointed Bill Bowen to senior vice president and general counsel. He will be responsible for all company legal and patent activities and will report to Sequenom's CEO Harry Hixson. Bowen was previously employed with Gen-Probe as senior vice president and general counsel and was a business litigation partner at Luce Forward Hamilton & Scripps. He holds a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law and a BS degree in management from the University of Virginia.
23andMe has named Christine Castro to vice president of communications, Neil Rothstein as vice president of marketing, and Jonathan Ward as vice president of strategic alliances.
Castro joins the company from Genentech, where she served as senior vice president of corporate relations. She has also held positions at Yahoo! and the Walt Disney Company. She holds a BA in journalism and an MA in communications management from the University of Southern California.
Rothstein has joined 23andMe from Netflix, where he held a variety of positions, including most recently as vice president of online marketing. He holds an MBA from the Gouizueta Business School at Emory University and a BA in economics from Brandeis University.
Ward most recently served as interim chief marketing officer at eHarmony.com and held a variety of other positions at the company. He holds a BA in English from Williams College and an MA in management from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has elected 70 new members including Lynda Chin, Stephen Quake, and Daniel Kastner.
Chin is currently a professor and chair of genomic medicine and scientific director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She also serves in a leadership role for the Cancer Genome Atlas and the International Cancer Genome Consortium.
Quake is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has developed technology for next-generation sequencing, including single-molecule sequencing and single cell sequencing, and has licensed technology for the detection of fetal aneploidies in maternal plasma to Verinata Health.
Kastner is the scientific director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, where, among other duties, he leads the inflammatory disease section of the medical genetics branch.
Adaptive Biotechnologies has named Ilan Kirsch senior vice president of translational medicine. He will lead the development and launch of clinical diagnostic applications stemming from the firm's immunoSeq and quanTILfy technology platforms. He joined Adaptive Bio on Oct. 8 and reports directly to CEO Chad Robins.
Kirsch was most recently executive director of oncology research at Amgen. Before that he spent 20 years at the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, where he at various times was chief of the genetics branch at the Center for Cancer Research and director of a CLIA-certified laboratory for diagnostic oncology. He holds an MD from Harvard University School of Medicine.
Glenn Farrell is now the managing director of marketing for Mount Sinai's Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology.
He joined the hospital from Pacific Biosciences, where he served as senior director of marketing communications. He holds a BA in political science from Yale University.
Molecular diagnostics firm Rosetta Genomics has hired Robert Wassman as chief medical officer and Dganit Bar as chief scientific officer.
Wassman joins Rosetta from Generation Health, where he was chief medical officer, executive vice president, and chief genomics officer. He has also held roles at Genzyme Genetics, Alfigen/The Genetics Institute, Good Start Genetics, and Genetrix.
Bar joins Rosetta from BioLineRx, where she was executive director of science and technology. She has also held roles at QBI Enterprises.