BIOTECHNOLOGY

Maureen Lindsay

In moving from Pharmacia Corporation to Ardana Bioscience, Maureen Lindsay is returning to both her geographical and intellectual roots. The switch from the global pharmaceutical company to a five-person start-up allows Lindsay to concentrate more on her own research in reproductive health, the company's focus. It also allows her to return to her native Scotland. In Edinburgh, Lindsay serves as Ardana's chief commercial officer, whereas her last position with Pharmacia was as market company president in New Zealand. Ardana was created in July 2000 to commercialize research developed over the past 28 years by the Medical Research Council Human Reproductive Sciences Unit in Edinburgh. The company's next step is to recruit a clinical director.

After nearly 21 years in the United States Navy, Steve Hoffman retired from active duty to take a position as senior vice-president at Celera Genomics in Rockville, Maryland. His primary responsibilities will be to use Celera's genomics and proteomics data and bioinformatics capabilities to develop vaccines, therapeutic antibodies, and biologicals against cancer, infectious diseases, and inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Hoffman is also coordinating the company's interaction with the Anopheles gambiae Genome Project International Consortium. Celera's role will be to sequence and assemble the genome of A. gambiae, the mosquito considered to be the most important carrier of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.

PHYSICS

Elisabeth Giacobino Credit: CNRS

This spring Elisabeth Giacobino continues her ascent at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, with an appointment to director of the CNRS physical sciences and mathematical department. Giacobino joined the CNRS in 1969, working as a researcher in the Hertzian spectroscopy laboratory, which has since become the Kastler-Brossel Laboratory. In 1982 she was promoted to research director and was appointed head of the Kastler-Brossel Laboratory in 1999. Giacobino is studying quantum fluctuations and the utilization of the quantum properties of light for information processing. This work could lead to industrial applications of opto-electronic systems for sectors such as telecommunications and information technologies. She succeeds Jean-Paul Pouget, who had held this position since October 1997.

Paul Chu, who led a group in the discovery of yttrium barium copper oxide, the first material that became superconducting when cooled by liquid nitrogen, will become president of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology starting in July. Chu will maintain his research group at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston, where he has worked since 1987. He looks forward to juggling both responsibilities. “There is a way when there is a will,” he says. “To be a president will be my main exciting and challenging job in Hong Kong, and to do research will continue to be my lifetime hobby in Houston.”

Paul Chu

Persis Drell, professor of physics at Cornell University, New York, will lead the Cornell group at CLEO — one of the world's most advanced and sensitive particle detectors. CLEO is used to study elementary particles produced by the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR), an electron–positron collider. Among other things, it is being used to test the standard model, which describes the properties of elementary particles. Cornell's CLEO group has 42 researchers and staff. Drell's priority is to complete and commission the US$15 million upgrade to the CLEO detector, known as CLEO III, that was started in 1994 and will be finished this year.

COMPUTER SCIENCE

The long-time director of the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), Sid Karin, has stepped down to pursue other goals. Computer scientist Francine Berman was elevated to the top post of both SDSC and NPACI, a consortium of research institutions funded by the National Science Foundation. After 16 years at SDSC, Karin said he plans to consider a number of career options, including research, teaching and involvement with start-up companies on whose boards of directors he serves.