ELIXIR is pleased to announce the appointment of Jerry Lanfear as its new Chief Technical Officer (CTO). As CTO, Jerry will lead the design and implementation of an ELIXIR-wide technical strategy and oversee developments across the five ELIXIR Platforms (Data, Tools, Interoperability, Compute and Training). Working with ELIXIR Members and international partners, Jerry will bring together scientific and technical expertise and resources for the development of ELIXIR's portfolio of bioinformatics services.
Jerry takes over the CTO position from Rafael Jiménez, who has served as ELIXIR CTO from 2014 and who is coming to an end of his nine-year tenure with EMBL-EBI and ELIXIR. Until the end of his contract Rafael will keep working on key projects within ELIXIR and in close collaboration with Jerry to ensure a smooth transition as ELIXIR’s moves towards its new programming period (2019-2023).
Commenting on the appointment, Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Director said: “Jerry brings with him a wealth of knowledge, experience and expertise in informatics and data management. I am delighted we have been able to find such a skilled and experienced leader for this key role. I would also like to thank Rafael who has done an outstanding job in setting up and coordinating ELIXIR’s technical developments to date.”
Jerry joins ELIXIR from Pfizer where he was a Senior Director within the IT group with responsibility for IT service delivery across R&D within the UK and for data management globally. In this role, he led a diverse group across multiple sites in the UK and the US, with a strong focus on enabling drug discovery through the application of IT tools, services and processes including desktop and lab support, high performance computing, data support and competitive intelligence. Prior to this role he had held a number of leadership roles at Pfizer in the fields of sample logistics, data management, bioinformatics and target discovery.
Jerry holds a DPHIL. degree in Molecular Biology from the University of Oxford and a BSc. in Marine Biology from the University of Liverpool.