Richard Michelmore, a professor of genetics at UC Davis and an internationally known genomics expert, has been selected as founding director of the UC Davis Genome Center.

"With the broad range of genomics and bioinformatics research on our campus, from food crops to laboratory animals, UC Davis is already making unique contributions in this area," said Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw. "Dr Michelmore has the leadership and expertise to enable UC Davis to expand these efforts and realize new achievements in this critical multidisciplinary effort. I'm surely excited about working with him on this endeavor."

Michelmore will oversee the hiring of 15 new faculty members in genomics and bioinformatics, as well as the final stages of constructing and equipping the Genome Center. The center will be located in the $95 million Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility, located north of Tupper Hall in the health sciences district. The building is scheduled to open in summer 2004.

Describing genomics as a "global approach" to biology that embraces everything from DNA sequencing and protein structure to metabolic profiling and population genetics, Michelmore said that the center would take advantage of the breadth of interests at UC Davis to attack related questions in different groups of organisms. For example, there are similarities in the way microorganisms infect plants and animals.

Michelmore anticipates that new faculty hired for the center will be evenly split between research interests in plants, animals and microbes, with several whose work involves multiple groups of organisms. The new hires will include both "wet-lab" scientists and bioinformatics researchers who do most of their work on computers.