PHYSICS

Shuheng Pan

Ananth Dodabalapur has left Bell Labs after 11 years to take up an endowed chair at the University of Texas at Austin. Dodabalapur says his decision to leave Bell was not related to the financial woes of its parent company Lucent. “I've been wanting to go to academia for a while,” he says. He adds that Bell Labs has a long history of producing scientists who later leave for academia. His new position will allow the electrical and computer engineer to build up an interdisciplinary programme in organic electronics and photonics, which will also draw from chemistry and microelectronics — areas that he sees as strengths at the university.

After positions in Switzerland, Germany, Berkeley and Boston, physicist Shuheng Pan has moved to the University of Houston, Texas. Although he enjoyed aspects of all his previous appointments, Pan says that Houston offered him a position that was too good to pass up — a tenured position with an endowed chair and plenty of guaranteed support to pay for postdocs and infrastructure. “They are providing me with very good start-up funds, and very good operational support,” Pan says. “I don't have to struggle for funding.” Pan's work centres on the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), and with the new funds, he will build an STM that can handle supercooled samples — a project that he relishes. “Every time I go to a new place I try to develop a new design, try to push it further,” he says. He is especially keen to increase the STM's capacity to handle supercooled samples as this increases resolution and allows physicists to probe phenomena that only occur at extreme temperatures. Pan will bring one postdoc with him from Boston University and is also working to get one from his native China.

BIOTECHNOLOGY

Scott Lillibridge

Genomics-based neuroscience start-up Renovis last month appointed co-founder Corey Goodman as chief executive and member of its board of directors. Goodman, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, previously served the company as an adviser. Renovis' acting president and chief operating officer, Lynne Zydowsky, who also co-founded the company, will continue to serve as chief operating officer, but on 1 September also assumed the role of senior vice-president, business development. A third co-founder, Tito Serafini, previously a neurobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, was named chief discovery scientist and vice-president for genomic research; and Andrew Shyjan was named vice-president, molecular biology. The San Francisco-based company uses gene-expression profiles in neuronal cell types to identify drug targets associated with neuronal regeneration, pain, behavioural disorders and psychiatric diseases.

GOVERNMENT

Scott Lillibridge will head the bioterrorism initiative at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Lillibridge has been with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) since 1990, and has led its Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program since 1998. In 1995, he led the US medical delegation to Japan after the gas attack that killed 10 people in the Tokyo subway. He also participated in the federal public-health assessment following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He has worked in 14 nations on epidemiology and other public-health issues. Before joining the CDC, Lillibridge served in the Indian Health Service in Oklahoma and Arizona.

Anthony Hayward

The National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health, last month named Anthony Hayward as associate director of clinical research. Hayward is currently professor of paediatrics, microbiology and immunology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and associate director of the university's Pediatric General Clinical Research Center. In his new position, Hayward will oversee several clinical research initiatives, including efforts in pancreatic-islet cells and gene therapy. Hayward's scientific accomplishments include the first description of leukocyte-adhesion-molecule deficiency as a blood disease, and identification of a new form of severe combined immunodeficiency in the Navajo Indian population.