San Diego ceiling
New academic leadership in San Diego aims to amp up cluster's translational power
A decade ago, San Diego sat poised to compete with Boston and San Francisco as one of the nation's top biotech hubs, with Biocom, the local industry organization, making a priority of luring investors to the region to seed new businesses. While industry is still struggling to change its bronze place position, the academic centers are recruiting top talent and ramping up activities to capitalize on their science.
On Jan. 1, Elizabeth Blackburn will take the helm as president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, replacing retiring incumbent William Brody. Blackburn, who spent the last 26 years on the faculty at the University of California San Francisco, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on telomeres, and in 2010 co-founded Telomere Diagnostics Inc. ...