Transitions

Göran Ando, head of research and development at US drug group Pharmacia until it was bought by Pfizer last month, has become chief executive of Celltech, Britain's largest biotech company. The move comes in preparation for the firm's impending acquisition of Oxford GlycoSciences. Ando's predecessor at Celltech, Peter Fellner, is to become the company's chairman.

Brian Boyle, director of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, will take up the directorship of the Australia Telescope National Facility in July.

Photonics researchers David Cotter, Andrew Ellis, Robert Manning and Paul Townsend are relocating from the Corning Research Centre in Ipswich, UK, to University College Cork, Ireland, as part of an €11.1-million (US$13-million) grant from Science Foundation Ireland.

This July, Anindya Dutta will move from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston to the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, to become professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics and professor of pathology.

Prabhavathi Fernandes has joined the supervisory board of GPC Biotech, a biotechnology firm based in Martinsried, Germany. She most recently served as chief executive at Ricerca Biosciences in Concord, Ohio.

London-based SR Pharma has appointed David Hill as chief executive and board member. Hill was previously chief executive of Sedac-Therapeutics, an immunotherapy-development company based in Lille, France.

MEDICINE

Harriett Wallberg-Henriksson

Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson can claim a couple of firsts: she was the first female dean of the Karolinska Institute's medical faculty and the first female head of the Swedish Scientific Council for Medicine. Last month, she added another to her list — first female president of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The irony is, she never set out to be a trail-blazer for her gender.

In the mid-1990s, she was asked to serve as deputy head of the Swedish medical research council. As it was a part-time job, she kept her position as professor of physiology and gritted her teeth to do battle with bureaucracy. “To my big surprise I really liked doing research administration,” Wallberg-Henriksson says. She will replace Hans Wigzell at the Karolinska Institute next January, after he finishes his second four-year term.

ADMINISTRATION

Malcolm Grant

Reflecting on his professional journey, which has taken him from New Zealand to Britain and from University College London (UCL) to the University of Cambridge and back, Malcolm Grant considered how much of his movement was by design. “Do people plan their careers?” he asks. “The answer is, absolutely not.” Grant, who will leave his position as pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge in October to become UCL's provost, says that his origins as a law professor led somewhat serendipitously to his current incarnation as an administrator.

His training in environmental law led to his first UCL post as a law professor and his later role as chair of the UK Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission, which advises the government on the implications of biotechnology. That involvement will help him at UCL. “In that capacity, I've had quite a lot of encounters with biotechnology and research,” he says.

Grant sees his primary challenges at UCL in terms of fixing old buildings and creating new ones on a limited budget, as well as finding ways to pay faculty members more — something he says is necessary to be competitive. The erosion of staff salaries at leading UK universities is “nothing short of a scandal”, Grant says.

BASIC RESEARCH

John Brighton

John Brighton has decades of experience in steering the research directions of individual universities. Last month, he began guiding engineering funding for the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Brighton, who was previously provost of National-Louis University in Evanston, Illinois, is now head of the NSF's directorate for engineering. Before his stint at National-Louis, he was provost and professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he was also dean of the engineering college. Before that, he held faculty positions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Purdue University.

In those positions, Brighton served on the other side of the NSF review process, helping other faculty members to submit research proposals for grants. Now, he is looking forward to deciding what broad areas of basic engineering should be funded. That prospect attracted him to the job. “I thought it might be interesting, meeting with the top people of the country regularly in particular disciplines and talking to them about what's important, what's emerging, what we should be emphasizing,” says Brighton. He is especially excited about identifying and funding young, up-and-coming researchers and encouraging more collaborative work nationwide.

STRUCTURAL BIOLOGY

Sine Larsen

This month, Sine Larsen left her vice-dean position in the natural-science faculty at the University of Copenhagen to become research director at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). Although she has moved to the ESRF's home in Grenoble, France, she plans to keep her structural biology group in Copenhagen intact.

For Larsen, the decision to move to France marks a dramatic change. She has been at the University of Copenhagen since returning from a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. She acquiesced to the headhunting partly because her children had grown up, so moving wouldn't disrupt her family. “It should be a good time to take new challenges,” she says.

She doesn't speak French, but is looking forward to learning. She is also looking forward to working with Francesco Sette, the ESRF's other research director. Larsen brings a chemistry background to the synchrotron, whereas Sette provides physics skills. In addition, Larsen says that she will retain her position as general secretary and treasurer in the International Union of Crystallography.