BIOLOGY

David Thurston, director of a centre at the University of Nottingham funded by the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC), is relocating to the University of London in July, following a tobacco controversy. The CRC had agreed to raise £1.5 million (US$2.1 million) for the group's new research facility. But the organization balked after the university accepted £3.8 million from British American Tobacco, to build a new department within the business school called the Institute for Corporate and Social Responsibility. Although the CRC did not threaten Thurston's existing funding, he was concerned that future support for other members of his team could be jeopardized. The University of London offered Thurston renovated lab space in the School of Pharmacy. He is also relocating his spin-off company, SpiroGen, to London.

Sharon Long

Sharon Long, a researcher who studied nitrogen fixation in plants, has been appointed dean of Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences. Long is the William C. Steere, Jr/Pfizer Professor in Biological Sciences; professor, by courtesy, in the Department of Biochemistry; and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). She succeeds Malcolm Beasley, who will step down in August after three years in post. The school is the largest of Stanford's seven and encompasses the core humanities, fine arts, languages and literatures, social sciences, mathematics and the natural sciences. One of Long's goals is to foster more collaborations between the mathematical and experimental sciences. When she assumes her new role as dean, Long will step down from her position on the Bio-X executive committee and as an HHMI investigator. She will continue her research on bacterial–plant symbiosis but with fewer staff.

Arcady Mushegian

The Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a US$200 million facility which formally opened this month in Kansas City, Missouri, recently appointed four new scientists, all of whom will join the institute this summer. The four new appointments, along with two announced in December, effectively double the number of scientific teams working at the cancer research institute. Arcady Mushegian will head the institute's bioinformatics programme. Mushegian currently leads the bioinformatics programme at Akkadix Corporation, an agricultural biotechnology company based in La Jolla, California. Kent Golic will lead a team in understanding gene regulation in Drosophilia. He is currently professor of genetics at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Paul Trainor will study interactions between different kinds of tissues in mice. Trainor is currently at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, Britain. Chunying Du will investigate apoptosis in cancer. Du is now a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoc at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Bill Neaves, president and chief executive of the Stowers Institute, aims to have 50 to 60 scientific teams, each of about 10 people, including technicians, in place by 2010.

POLICY

Chunying Du

Xu Guanhua, a remote-sensing expert who has been in charge of promoting China's high-tech enterprises, will head the country's Ministry of Science and Technology. He succeeds Zhu Lilan, who assumes a top legislative post within the National People's Congress. Xu will direct a growing science and technology budget that reached US$6.5 billion in 1999. He oversees state-run scientific institutes, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as well as funding for key basic research projects, high-technology development, scientific infrastructure and international collaborations. A native of Shanghai, Xu was trained as a forestry scientist and spent 30 years working for the Chinese Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences before moving to the CAS. In 1992, he was named an academician, a high honour in Chinese science. Xu is credited with helping to develop the country's remote-sensing industry with global information system instruments.

PHYSICS

Laser physicist John Hegarty will begin a 10-year term as provost of Trinity College in Dublin this August. He has promised to encourage innovation in teaching, increase the number of students from under-represented groups and to promote excellence in research. He has both academic and industrial experience; after spells at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Bell Laboratories in the US, he moved to Trinity as professor of laser physics in 1986. Since then he has also served as head of the physics department and dean of research. He also established Optronics Ireland in 1989.