Kristin Persson will be stepping down as the Molecular Foundry Division Director at the end of June. Effective July 1, Andy Minor will serve as the Interim Foundry Director, joining Deputy Director Jim Ciston, Senior Business Manager Deirdre Olynick, User Program Director Shannon Ciston, and the rest of the leadership team in the Foundry. An Interim Facility Director for the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) will be appointed, and Kristin will remain in a Senior Advisor role until the close of the quinquennial review process. The search for the next Foundry director is underway and a strong pool of candidates is currently under review by the search committee.

Andy has been a member of the Molecular Foundry’s leadership team since 2014, and as Facility Director of NCEM, he has had extensive experience leading the successful development of new programs and partnerships, numerous recruitments, and the commissioning and operations of new instruments. Prior to that, he served as the Deputy Director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division from 2013-2014. After graduate school at UC Berkeley, Andy joined NCEM as a staff scientist in 2003 and became a faculty member at UC Berkeley in 2008. Andy has built an internationally renowned research and user program with a focus on developing and using leading-edge electron microscopy approaches to study the structural and mechanical properties of materials at the nanoscale.