Jensen named director of Core Laboratory Facility at VBI

The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) at Virginia Tech has named Roderick Jensen as director of the Core Laboratory Facility (CLF). Jensen will serve as a member of the senior management team with direct responsibilities for managing the CLF and shaping its strategic direction over the coming years.

VBI’s Core Laboratory Facility is a multi-user resource providing various high-throughput technologies and other state-of-the-art technology-related services to clients in academic and private sector settings. The CLF currently provides analysis platforms for DNA sequencing and genotyping, gene expression analysis, and proteomics.

“It gives me great pleasure to welcome Rick Jensen to the VBI team. In addition to his proven track record as a teacher and researcher, Rick has first-hand experience in directing transdisciplinary research projects in state-of-the-art functional genomics and DNA microarray facilities,” remarked VBI’s Executive and Scientific Director Bruno Sobral. “Rick has been actively engaged in a wide range of biomedical research projects in academic, government and industrial settings across the country. His managerial experience and strategic outlook should prove invaluable as we look to the future development and growth of our services in the Core Laboratory Facility. The recent addition of the Roche GS-FLX™ genome sequencer confirms our commitment to making the very latest state-of-the-art technologies available to the life science community.”

Jensen joins VBI from the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), where he served as the Alton Brann Distinguished Professor of Physics, Biology, and Mathematics and the Director of the Center for Environmental Health, Science, and Technology. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Since 1982, Jensen has held positions in the faculties of Physics and Applied Physics at Yale, Physics, Neuroscience, and Molecular Biology at Wesleyan University, and Physics and Neuroscience at Texas A&M. From 2002 to 2004, Jensen served as director of the Biotechnology Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. His work has been recognized by the receipt of an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, and election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Over the past 25 years, Jensen has conducted research on transdisciplinary problems in nonlinear dynamics, complex systems and chaos theory. He has published more than 120 publications in areas spanning classical and quantum physics, computational neuroscience, functional genomics and systems biology, and presented at more than 50 national and international conferences.