COMPUTER SCIENCE
Andrew Odlyzko
Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician and computer scientist known for his stance favouring free access to electronically published research (see Nature's online debate http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access), is leaving AT&T in August to head up the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center. Odlyzko, who fondly calls his stint at AT&T "a 26-year postdoc", spent the last six years there leading the mathematics and cryptography research department.
While at AT&T, his work ranged from projects in security, distributed and parallel computing and, more recently, the economics of e-commerce and electronic publishing. Those more recent interests have prompted him to acquiesce to a headhunter's call soliciting him for the Minnesota position. "My research horizons have been getting broader," he says. "I have been getting interested in scientific policy and copyrights among other things."
At the university, where he will also serve as assistant vice-president for research, Odlyzko will supervise 150 technical people — most of whom will be postdocs, graduate students and visiting fellows. The centre has 14 faculty positions, half of which have been filled. The centre will house the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, the Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, and the Telecommunications and Advanced Networking Laboratory. Its research focuses include telecommunications and advanced networking, software storage and Internet technologies, data storage and visualization, electronic commerce and digital publishing, bioinformatics and computational biology, among others.
BIOTECH
Denis Ravel, former head of the Metabolism Department of the French pharmaceutical company Servier, has joined Genset in its Paris offices as Director of Pharmaceutical Development. Ravel fills some of the void created when Bernard Bihain, one of the company's two scientific directors, unexpectedly resigned in February, over what some biotech analysts have said was disagreement arising from Genset's transition from a gene research company to a drug-development firm. At the heart of the dispute is an anti-obesity drug, Famoxin, a protein that had shown some promise in preclinical animal experiments. Bihain reportedly was upset at the way the company characterized some of those findings. He now is chief scientific officer at ValiGen, a European–US biotechnology company. Ravel, who spent 17 years with Servier, has developed drugs for both obesity and type 2 diabetes. "For me it's not really a big change," he says of the new position. However, at Servier, he focused more on small molecules, whereas at the biotech company he will spend more time working on proteins and peptides.
G. Scott Hubbard
David Briscoe now holds the newly created position of commercial director for Pharmagene. Briscoe comes to the Cambridge-based company from Incyte Genomics, where he managed European operations for the Palo Alto, California-based company. He has 25 years' experience with life science companies, including stints with Chiron, Schering Plough and Bristol Myers Squibb.
SPACE SCIENCE
G. Scott Hubbard, who reorganized the NASA's Mars Program after losses of two robots last year, has relinquished the position. Hubbard launched the 2001 Mars Odyssey Program this spring. He has returned to NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Orlando Figueroa, currently the deputy chief engineer for systems engineering at NASA Headquarters, Washington DC, replaced Hubbard as acting director of the programme. Figueroa spent 22 years of his career at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
GENOMICS
David Millhorn
David Millhorn, chairman of the department of molecular and cellular physiology at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, will serve as director of the university's new Genome Research Institute. The institute will use information from the Human Genome Project to characterize genetic traits in various diseases. The institute will be located in a 360,000-square-foot laboratory facility donated by Aventis Pharmaceuticals. The university is currently recruiting other University of Cincinnati scientists and outside researchers to join the institute. Within five years, the university anticipates having a group of 40 to 50 principal investigators at the institute.
