Calling it "an opportunity I couldn't turn down," National Institute of General Medical Sciences Director Marvin Cassman says he plans to leave NIH in mid-May to become director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) in San Francisco.

QB3, where Cassman will oversee programs designed to integrate physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences to address biological problems, is a partnership of three University of California campuses: San Francisco, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz. The institute's headquarters will be part of the new Mission Bay campus of UCSF.

"It's in a location not matched by any other," says Cassman of the critical mass of life sciences research facilities in Northern California. He says he hopes to continue the sort of work that has been the hallmark of his NIH career--bringing together basic researchers from a variety of physical and life sciences disciplines in order to advance basic biomedical research.

Cassman says he is particularly enthusiastic about the emphasis on bioinformatics at QB3. "I will attempt to bring together independent investigators with a common goal, and bioinformatics is a big part of that."

Cassman, 65, has worked at NIGMS since 1975. He became director in 1996. Among the recent accomplishments at NIGMS that Cassman says he is most proud of are various programs to recruit and train minority researchers in the biomedical sciences, NIGMS's Complex Systems Initiative, and its multidisciplinary Glue Grant consortia (C&EN, Jan. 21, page 30).

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