The three University of California laboratories that manage the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, announced on November 3rd the appointment of Dr. Trevor Hawkins as Director of the JGI. Dr. Hawkins replaces Dr. Elbert Branscomb who will assume a leadership of the newest project of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (OBER), “Bringing the Genome to Life: Energy Related Biology in the New Genomic World.”
Dr. Hawkins became Deputy Director of the JGI in 1999. In July of this year he was appointed Division Director of the newly established Genomics Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His leadership of the Production Sequencing Facility (PSF) located in Walnut Creek, California, has placed the JGI among the leading sequencing centers in the world.
Dr. Hawkins obtained his B.Sc. at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and completed the Ph.D in biochemistry in 1993. That same year he joined the MIT/Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research, heading up a new DNA sequencing group and becoming the first MIT/Whitehead Assistant Professor in 1996. In 1997 he was named Vice President of Genomics for the CuraGen Corporation and was appointed to the faculty of the University of Florida as an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine.
Dr. Elbert Branscomb, charter director of the JGI, was responsible for uniting the genomic efforts of the three UC laboratories and for bringing their multi-disciplinary strengths to the genome sequencing arena. He will remain associated with the JGI in an advisory capacity but his principal activity will be to develop the new OBER program, “Bringing the Genome to Life,” which is aimed at developing the capability of understanding and predicting the behavior of single cells and multi-cellular organisms in response to biological and environmental signals.