Karen E. Nelson, Ph.D., Named Director of J. Craig Venter Institute Rockville, MD Campus

ROCKVILLE, Md., Dec. 7 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The J. Craig Venter Institute announced today that Karen E. Nelson, Ph.D. has been named Director of the JCVI Rockville, MD campus. Dr. Nelson and Robert Friedman, Ph.D., Director of the San Diego, CA facility since 2008, are senior leaders of the two campuses of the JCVI and report directly to J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., Founder and President, JCVI. She replaces Robert Strausberg who is leaving JCVI January 8, 2010 to join the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) Ltd as Director for Collaborative Sciences. Dr. Strausberg will maintain a joint position at JCVI and will continue cancer genomic collaborations between JCVI and LICR.

Dr. Nelson, who joined JCVI's legacy organization, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in 1996, has steadily risen to become one of the leaders in the fields of microbial and metagenomics research. As Director of JCVI's Human Microbiology and Metagenomics group, Dr. Nelson has significantly advanced the emerging field of human metagenomics by cataloging and understanding the microbes that inhabit the human body. She is a key investigator on the large, multi-center grant from the National Institutes of Health's Human Microbiome Project. The goal of this project is to sequence and understand the microbes that live in the human body and their contribution to human health and disease. Dr. Nelson and her group were part of a national team of researchers who completed the first comprehensive survey of the human gastrointestinal tract. She and her team continue this groundbreaking work and will be publishing new results in the near future.

Dr. Nelson has authored or co-authored more than 90 publications, and is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Microbial Ecology. She is also a standing member of the NRC Committee on Biodefense, and a member of the American Society for Microbiology Communications Committee. Dr. Nelson received her B.Sc. in Animal Science from the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, her M.Sc. in Animal Science from the University of Florida, Gainesville and her Ph.D. in Microbiology from Cornell University.

Dr. Venter commented, "I am grateful to Bob for his years of service to the Venter Institute, especially his work on the human genomics program and his leadership on the many important grants and contracts awarded to JCVI. I look forward to continuing collaborations with him and LICR on our cancer genomics projects."

J. Craig Venter Institute