Rehm Replaces Haussler As GA4GH Vice Chair, Other Changes

December 10, 2018

By Bio-IT World Staff

December 10, 2018 GA4GH announced changes to the leadership team this morning in a letter authored by Ewan Birney, GA4GH Chair, and Peter Goodhand, GA4GH CEO.

GA4GH Vice Chair David Haussler, Scientific Director of the University of California Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, will be stepping down. Haussler plan the initial scoping meeting in 2013 and co-authored the White Paper that set the mandate for what became the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. He has also chaired working groups and been involved in work streams and demonstration projects. “David has been critical to our success and we look forward to continued engagement with him and his talented team,” Birney and Goodhand wrote.

Haussler is succeeded by Heidi Rehm, an institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and chief genomics officer at Massachusetts General Hospital. Rehm will join Kathryn North as a GA4GH Vice Chair. Over the years, Rehm has served a variety of roles at GA4GH including founding co-lead of the former GA4GH Demonstration Project Matchmaker Exchange (MME), Driver Project Champion for both MME and ClinGen, Steering Committee Member, 5th Plenary Programme Committee Chair, and frequent contributor to a number of Work Streams, including Discovery, Genomic Knowledge Standards, and Clinical and Phenotypic Data Capture.

There were also changes among GA4GH Work Streams Leads:

  • Ravi Pandya (Microsoft) and Anthony Philippakis (Broad Institute) have both stepped down as Co-Chairs of the Data Use and Researcher Identities Work Stream, to be replaced by Moran Cabili, Associate Director of Data Strategy and Alliances at Broad Institute's Data Science Platform, and Tommi Nyrönen, Head of the ELIXIR Finland Node, which is hosted at CSC-IT Center for Science Finland. 

  • Harindra Arachchi stepped down as Co-Lead of the Discovery Work Stream when he began a new role at the commercial company Editas Medicine in Cambridge, MA. Harindra is succeeded by Michael Baudis, a professor of bioinformatics (theoretical cytogenetics and oncogenomics) at the University of Zurich UZH and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics SIB. 
  • Paul Flicek, a senior scientist and team leader at EMBL-EBI, is stepping down as Co-Chair of the Data Security Work Stream after many years of GA4GH involvement. He is succeeded by Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Professor of Computer and Communication Science and Head of the Computer Communications and Applications Laboratory at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. 

“We would like to thank every one of these individuals for their service to GA4GH over the past four years and into the future,” wrote Birney and Goodhand. “Without passionate, dedicated contributors like them our organisation and its important work would not be possible.”