Susan Baxter Joins the National Center for Genome Resources as Chief Operating Officer

Business Wire, May 4, 2004

Business Editors/Health/Medical Writers

SANTA FE, N.M.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 4, 2004

The National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) today announced the appointment of Susan M. Baxter as chief operating officer. Dr. Baxter will lead and direct software engineering, bioinformatics tool development and information technology for NCGR's discovery platforms, based on data obtained from high-throughput biotechnologies.

"I am delighted that Susan joins NCGR in this critical role," said Dr. Stephen F. Kingsmore, president of NCGR. "Susan brings to NCGR professional management experience in software engineering, and significant background in information resource applications to pharmaceutical development that will be critical for achieving our mission of the translation of collaborative and computational research into improvements in human health and nutrition."

Prior to joining NCGR, Baxter was vice president of Research and Genome Analysis at GeneFormatics, later Cengent Therapeutics, a drug discovery company in San Diego. Her responsibilities included managing programs in both target and lead discovery, along with development of automated protein annotation and analysis pipelines. Previously she was a tenured researcher at the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Center, where she used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to characterize DNA-binding proteins and their complexes. Baxter received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. She holds a B.A. degree in chemistry from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. Following doctoral work, Baxter was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Molecular Biology at University of Oregon.

Founded in 1994, NCGR is a non-profit research institute dedicated to translating research at intersections between bioscience, computing and mathematics into improvements in global health, and nutrition, and abolition of infectious disease. NCGR addresses the growing need to integrate and analyze research results generated at different locations, different times, and with disparate technologies by provision of integrated, Internet-based biological information resources and development of innovative bioscience software. Additional information about the National Center for Genome Resources can be found at www.ncgr.org.