— Vancouver, Wash.-based AI drug design and development company Absci named Frans van Houten to its board of directors.
A longtime business exec, van Houten is known for spearheading Philips’ expansion into health technology. During a nearly 12-year tenure as CEO, he divested in the company’s consumer tech divisions, including TV, audio, video, and lighting, while acquiring more than 30 med-tech companies.
Van Houten serves on the board of pharmaceutical giant Novartis and acts as an advisor to private equity companies. He served in 2017 as co-chair at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Absci began commercial operations in 2018. The publicly traded company deploys generative AI and other computational methods, as well as laboratory screening techniques, to help drug companies find and develop protein-based drugs.
Last year, Absci appointed former Meta senior executive Dan Rabinovitsj and Microsoft vet Joseph Sirosh to its board.
— Amazon Web Services India and Southeast Asia President Puneet Chandok stepped down. The resignation, first reported by TechCrunch, comes after the exec worked at the tech giant for more than four years. Prior to AWS, Chandok worked as a partner at McKinsey & Co. for more than a decade.
— Jon Roskill was appointed to QorusDocs‘ board of directors. During his tenure as CEO of Acumatica, Roskill led the enterprise cloud software startup, which was acquired by private equity firm EQT Group in 2019. Following the acquisition, he acted as a special advisor at EQT for about a year and a half.
— University of Washington computer science researcher Justin Chan is joining Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor in engineering. His research at the UW focused on “building intelligent mobile and embedded systems for computational health and large-scale environmental sensing.” Chan’s research is the basis for Wavely Diagnostics, a startup he co-founded that develops an app to detect ear infections.
— Jessica Piha-Grafstein is joining USAFacts as communications director. Piha-Grafstein previously served as senior director of corporate communications and public affairs at Funko, the Everett, Wash.-based toy company. She also worked as an independent communications consultant.