CANCER RESEARCH

Karen Vousden

Karen Vousden, chief of the Regulation of Cell Growth Laboratory at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), will return to the United Kingdom this summer to help expand a cancer research centre in Scotland. Vousden was appointed director of the Beatson Institute in Glasgow last month. Part of the attraction is a £10 million (US$14.3 million) expansion of the Beatson's campus in Bearsden, which will provide facilities for 100 additional scientists when it is completed in 2004. The construction will be a big draw to prospective scientists, says Vousden, who is looking forward to recruiting. Some postdocs from her NCI lab have already agreed to make the move with her in August. “Others are thinking about whether they can bear the rain,” she jokes.

PHYSICS

Associate professor of physics Dik Bouwmeester this month took up permanent residence in his new lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, after moving from Oxford in January.

Bouwmeester, who studies the quantum properties of light and is investigating how those properties could be used in cryptography, was attracted to California in part because the university system there is committed to increasing its investments in nanotechnology — including $200 million being distributed between the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles campuses for new facilities.

He hopes that those facilities, and interactions with a growing pool of scientists who will fill them, will provide the opportunity to combine his interests in optics and nanotechnology.

ASTRONOMY

Simon Lilly

After a little over a year as director-general of Canada's centre of astronomy, the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (HIA) in British Columbia, Simon Lilly has left. Lilly departed in February to take up a position as professor at the Institute for Astronomy of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

Many factors, “both personal and professional”. contributed to his decision. On the personal level, the London-born astrophysicist had been in Canada since 1990. “The thought of coming back to Europe was really attractive,” Lilly says.

On the professional level, he felt he accomplished his main goal at the HIA, securing the future of the Long Range Plan for Canadian astronomy, developed in 1998. “I felt I had already set things on a very positive track,” Lilly says. Although he enjoyed his administrative duties with the HIA, he says he is keen to focus more on science, particularly in increasing the ETH's presence in extragalactic astrophysics and observational cosmology.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

Paul Wellings

After 21 years with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), British environmental scientist Paul Wellings, the organization's deputy chief executive, is leaving Canberra to return to Britain. In August he takes up the position of vice-chancellor at Lancaster University.

Wellings previously held positions as chief of CSIRO entomology and head of the science and innovation division in the Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources before becoming a member of the CSIRO executive in 1999. Wellings will succeed Bill Ritchie, who retires this summer.

NEUROBIOLOGY

This month, neurobiologist Brian Popko was appointed the first Jack Miller professor in peripheral neuropathy at the University of Chicago. Popko researches myelinating glial cells, which provide a protective 'sheath' around nerves, and interactions between the immune and nervous systems.

Brian Popko

Popko came to Chicago from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a professor of biochemistry and biophysics and director of the functional genomes core facility.

ADMINISTRATION

Russel Kaufman has been appointed director and chief executive of the Wistar Institute, an independent non-profit biomedical research centre in Philadelphia. Currently a vice-dean at Duke University, Kaufman has been at the university since his medical residency in 1973, with the exception of a two-year break to do a fellowship at the US National Institutes of Health.

The new job will allow him to focus his interests back on basic biomedical research. At Duke, he is responsible for educational and academic affairs. “Right now I have a really broad palette,” he says. At Wistar, he wants to differentiate the institute from the University of Pennsylvania campus nearby, while at the same time strengthening the ties between the two institutions.

Several faculty at Wistar have joint appointments with the University of Pennsylvania, but Kaufman would like to see more formal research collaborations forged between the two.

Transitions

Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company, this month appointed Mark Perrone as vice-president of research and development. Perrone comes from Bristol-Myers Squibb.

Cozart Bioscience, an Oxfordshire-based medical diagnostics company, last month appointed David McGough as international business development manager. McGough comes to the company from LifePoint.

Princeton-based Orchid BioSciences this month appointed Kenneth Noonan to its board of directors. Noonan is a partner at London's LEK Consulting, where he leads the firm's life sciences practices in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Paris-based functional-proteomics company Hybrigenics this month hired Anne-Fabienne Weitsch as chief operating officer. Weitsch was previously senior director of licensing and business development at Johnson & Johnson.

Mike Pavia, chief technology officer for Millennium Pharmaceuticals, has joined the board of microfluidics company BioProcessors of Woburn, Massachusetts.

This summer Peter Baumann, a postdoc at the University of Colorado, Boulder, will join the Kansas City-based Stowers Institute, a basic cell biology institute which opened last year.

This month Astex Technology, a UK protein-structure-based drug-discovery company, appointed Peter Fellner as non-executive chairman of the board. Fellner has been CEO of Celltech Group since 1990.