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State taps NY firm to hire life sciences director
Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology
September 13, 2007

Massachusetts state officials plan to spend $75,000 to hire an executive director of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, which is expected to manage a $1 billion fund dedicated to growing the life sciences industry in the Bay State.

A five-member board that oversees the center voted unanimously today to hire New York-based recruiting company Russell Reynolds Associates, with offices in Boston, to conduct a national search to hire the center's new chief. The post has been vacant since July when Aaron D'Elia, an appointee of former Gov. Mitt Romney, resigned. Click here to find out more!

Russell Reynolds pulls in one-third of its health-care related recruiting revenue from Massachusetts, said Thomas Carey, the recruiting company's managing director and health-care sector leader for the Americas. A recent example of the company's work, said Carey, is its placement of Deborah Dunsire as CEO at Cambridge-based Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc.

"(Russell Reynolds) has the access to the top people in the life sciences sector," said Marc Beer, CEO of Cambridge-based ViaCell Inc. and a member of the board that approved the initiative.

Daniel O'Connell, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development, chairs the Life Sciences Center board. Other board members include Beer and Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts.

Bay State lawmakers are debating a bill, introduced by Gov. Deval Patrick this summer, that would invest $1 billion in state funding over the next decade toward growing the Massachusetts life sciences sector by offering tax incentives, grants and loans to life sciences academics and businesses.