MEDICINE

Leigh Anderson

This month saw Allen Steere switch both hospitals and universities. Steere, who is probably best known as the discoverer of Lyme disease, was chief of rheumatology and immunology at the New England Medical Center in Boston. He is now director of the clinical rheumatology and allergy programme at Massachusetts General Hospital also in Boston, and will run a lab with 8–12 researchers. At the same time, his teaching affiliation changes from professor at Tufts School of Medicine to professor at Harvard Medical School.

PROTEOMICS

As a result of corporate restructuring, Leigh Anderson, co-founder of proteomics company Large Scale Biology in Vacaville, California, has stepped down as one of the firm's directors, although he will continue to serve as a consultant for the company. The company merged with Biosource Technologies in 1999. Over the next few months, Anderson is planning to assess the field of proteomics. He acknowledges that the field has drawn its share of hype and relabelling, but he thinks that it will eventually have a clinical impact — especially in diagnostics. “The question for me is how that discipline will get translated into tools and results that will have a significant near-term medical impact,” Anderson says.

BIOINFORMATICS

Chris Sander

Chris Sander is set to head the new Computational Biology Center at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He will direct a programme of biological research using computational techniques and forge alliances between computational biologists and cancer researchers.

Sander is the editor of the journal Bioinformatics and he advises the US National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic Genomic Center and the IBM Deep Computing Initiative. He previously worked as chief information science officer with Millennium Pharmaceuticals and at the European Bioinformatics Institute. The new centre will be a key interface for the research collaborations between Sloan-Kettering, Cornell University and Rockefeller University.

MATERIALS

Angela Belcher, a young, high-profile, material-sciences researcher, will leave the University of Texas at Austin for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) this autumn. Belcher, whose work includes using viruses to grow synthetic materials, was attracted to MIT in part by its new nanotechnology lab and the chance to interact with the area's biotechnology community. “It's going to be a very exciting place for nanoscience and bioengineering,” Belcher says. Her graduate students and postdocs seem to agree — most have decided to join her when the lab opens in October. Until then, she will commute between the two campuses.

PHARMACEUTICALS

Biotechnology company Eyetech Pharmaceuticals this month welcomed Anthony Adamis from Harvard Medical School as its new senior vice-president of research and chief scientific officer. Eyetech specializes in the development and commercialization of drugs for treating eye diseases.

Adamis, who has been affiliated with Eyetech since its inception in 2000, was attracted to the company because it has drugs in the clinical pipeline that target vascular endothelial growth factor. “That's an area I've worked in for 10 years,” he says.

He will establish the Eyetech Research Laboratory in Boston, even though the company is based in New York. But he will still divide his research between basic and applied work, as the company needs to understand the pathogenesis of the eye diseases it intends to treat. He expects to have more resources than he would if he had stayed in an academic lab. “I'll be able to do science on a scale I haven't been able to do as an independent investigator,” he says.

ASTRONOMY

Harvard University astronomer Paul Ho has been splitting his time between the United States and Taiwan ever since he took over as acting director of Taiwan's Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei. He stepped into the breach last month when the previous director, Fred Lo, left to head the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (see Nature 417, 780; 2002).

This is a hectic time for Taiwanese astronomy, as the country is involved in three important projects that are scheduled to come online this year — the SubMillimeter-Wave Array, a set of antennas on Mauna Kea in Hawaii; a small interferometer to study microwave background radiation; and an experiment to look at Kuiper-belt objects.

“My purpose here is to stabilize things and make sure that the instrumentation goes forward,” Ho says. But he says he is uncertain how long he will remain in the position, as the search is under way for a permanent director.

Transitions

Mitchell Kronenberg is to replace Howard Grey as president and scientific director of the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology when Grey retires in September 2003. Kronenberg joined the institute in 1997 and is currently head of developmental immunology there.

This month saw Steven Teitelbaum become president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Teitelbaum is a professor of pathology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis.

Robert Booth is to be senior vice-president of research and development at Celera Genomics in Rockville, Maryland. Booth comes to the company from Hoffmann-La Roche, where he was senior vice-president of the inflammatory- and viral-diseases business unit.

Donal Geaney has resigned as chairman and chief executive of Elan in Dublin, and Thomas Lynch has resigned as the company's vice-chairman.

Ian McDonald has been named vice-president of drug discovery at Structural GenomiX in San Diego. Previously, he was vice-president of drug discovery at Structural Bioinformatics.

Brian Barber left Aventis Pasteur in Toronto to join Mojave Therapeutics in Hawthorne, New York, as chief scientific officer.

Gary Woodnutt is to join Diversa, a biotech company in San Diego, as senior vice-president, pharmaceutical development. His previous position was vice-president of microbiology at GlaxoSmithKline.