Note: UCSF's CTSI is part of the 60-institution CTSA consortium funded by NCATS and NIH.
In his last role two years ago with the Opera Vivente in Baltimore, Maryland, Christopher Austin played the Calvinist chaplain in Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor. The story does not lack for drama: the heroine pulls out a knife in her wedding bed and stabs to death the husband who has been forced on her in place of her true love. On the heels of the murder, the chaplain “is the guy who is trying to bring order to chaos”, says Austin, a bass-baritone who once considered a full-time career in opera.
Austin's most recent stage part has a certain resonance with his new day job. In September, he was appointed as director of the fledgling National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. In existence since December 2011, the centre has an ambitious — some say audacious — agenda that channels the central passion of both Austin and his boss, NIH director Francis Collins: to get more successful medicines into more patients, more quickly. That means forcing the agonizingly slow, failure-prone process of 'translational research' — the term of art for moving promising discoveries from the lab to the clinic — into a higher gear.
Read more at Nature.com