NEW YORK GENOME CENTER ANNOUNCES SEQUENCING, BIOINFORMATICS LEADERSHIP

Scientific Teams Recruited from Leading Research Institutions and Commercial Enterprises Worldwide

New York, NY, August 9, 2012 – New York Genome Center (NYGC) today announced the appointment of two members to its leadership team: Dirk J. Evers, PhD as Senior Vice President, Informatics, and Kevin V. Shianna, PhD, as Senior Vice President, Sequencing Operations.

Dr. Evers joins NYGC from Illumina, where he led their Computational Biology efforts in the UK, creating tools such as CASAVA and Illumina’s cancer analysis pipeline. Previously, he served for nearly four years as Managing Director of the International Graduate School in Bioinformatics and Genome Research at the Center for Biotechnology at Bielefeld University, graduating more than 30 PhDs in the departments of biology, technology, mathematics, and chemistry. He started his industry career with Exelixis working on Zebrafish reverse and forward genetic screens for drug target identification. Dr. Evers holds a doctorate in the natural sciences from Bielefeld University, where he worked under Profs. Robert Giegerich and Andreas Dress. His current interests are in large-scale translational genomics.

Dr. Shianna joins NYGC from Duke University, where he was an Assistant Professor at the School of Medicine, Director of Operations for the Center for Human Genome Variation, and Founding Director for the Genomic Analysis Facility. During this period, Dr. Shianna was involved with many high-profile projects leading to multiple publications in top-tier journals. He completed a PhD in 2001 from North Carolina State University, followed by postdoctoral research at Duke University, where he was awarded a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship.

“We are pleased to have Dirk and Kevin join the leadership team at NYGC,” said Nancy J. Kelley, Founding Executive Director. “Both of them are distinguished scientists with multi-faceted backgrounds, and both of them share our vision at New York Genome Center. I look forward to collaborating with them and the entire team to build the NYGC.”

Drs. Evers and Shianna are joined by a seasoned team of bioinformatics and sequencing professionals. These individuals have diverse academic, technology, and pharmaceutical backgrounds, with experience at organizations such as the Broad Institute, Illumina, Roche, and Washington University. Over the next five years, the NYGC expects to create more than 500 science-related jobs, over 350 of which will be in bioinformatics and sequencing.

About the New York Genome Center

Founded in August 2010, NYGC is an independent non-profit that magnifies the expertise and resources of world-class universities, medical centers, technology partners, pharmaceutical companies, and private philanthropists that are engaged in a cooperative effort to transform medical research and clinical care. NYGC’s Institutional Founding Members include: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University, Cornell University/Weill Cornell Medical College, The Jackson Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Medical Center, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, New York University/NYU School of Medicine, North Shore-LIJ Health System, The Rockefeller University, and Stony Brook University. The Hospital for Special Surgery is an Associate Founding Member.

NYGC will serve as a transformational catalyst for the future of science and medicine by creating an intellectually vibrant collaboration among the biomedical and research communities in New York. NYGC intends to become one of the largest genomic facilities in North America, establishing an unprecedented, large-scale collaborative venture in genomic medicine. The NYGC model (1) facilitates adoption of personalized medicine through its Institutional Founding Members that collectively treat millions of patients each year; (2) drives therapeutic and diagnostic product development by connecting technology collaborators and the pharmaceutical industry directly to researchers and clinicians at the front lines of discovery; and (3) accelerates the entire translational process by linking all the stakeholders in information-enabled common projects.

To date, NYGC has raised over $110 million in funds from its Institutional Founding Members; philanthropies such as the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies; and other strategic relationships, including the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the New York City Investment Fund.

Website:  www.nygenome.org
Facebook:  www.facebook.com/nygenome
Twitter:  @nygenome

Media Contacts

Business / General Press
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Larry Kopp / Kamian Allen
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Email: larry@thetascgroup.com / kamian@thetascgroup.com

 Scientific / Trade Press
Feinstein Kean Healthcare
Lynn Blenkhorn
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Email: lynn.blenkhorn@fkhealth.com

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