Robert Strausberg has been named deputy director of the J. Craig Venter Institute as part of a broad reorganization of its two research divisions — the Institute for Genomic Research and the Center for the Advancement of Genomics — into several more tightly focused units.
The JCVI will now consist of 10 distinct research groups: Genomic Medicine, Infectious Disease, Synthetic Biology & Bioenergy, Plant Genomics, Microbial & Environmental Genomics, Pathogen Functional Genomics, Applied Bioinformatics, Research Informatics, Software Engineering, and a Policy Center.
Craig Venter will remain president and chairman of the institute, and Strausberg, who had been president of TCAG, has been named deputy director. Eric Eisenstadt, former vice president for research of TIGR, has been named deputy vice president for research.
Marv Frazier, former vice president for research at TCAG, is now the executive vice president for research. Julie Gross Adelson has been named general counsel, while Aimee Turner, formerly CFO at TIGR, is now CFO of the JCVI.
Gene Logic has appointed Thomas Barnes as senior vice president of discovery. In this position, Barnes will lead the company's drug-repositioning discovery efforts.
Barnes was a co-founder of the drug-repositioning initiative within Millennium Pharmaceuticals, which Gene Logic acquired in 2004.
Prior to joining Gene Logic, Barnes led Millennium's development and application of genomic technologies for downstream drug development. He has also held academic appointments at Harvard Medical School and McGill University.
He will take over the duties of Louis Tartaglia, senior vice president of drug repositioning at Gene Logic, who will resign on June 15 to become a partner in a venture capital firm. Tartaglia, who also co-founded the drug-repositioning service at Millennium, will continue to serve on a consulting basis as a senior advisor.
Gene Logic has also elected David Urdal and Mark Gabrielson to its board of directors.
Urdal is currently senior vice president and chief scientific officer of Dendreon, while Gabrielson is a co-founder, director, and CEO of Pulmatrix.
In addition, the company said that Jules Blake is retiring from the board of directors after serving on the board since 1994.