Skolnick Bags Buffalo, Heads to Atlanta

Jeffrey Skolnick, a rare combination of brilliance in biology and informatics who was recruited with much fanfare to the University of Buffalo in 2002 from the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis to head the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics, is moving south, to Georgia Tech, and taking a team of 19 colleagues and $1.5 million a year in grants with him.

While there are many comings and goings in the new biology economy, this one is interesting from purely a geographic point of view. The 52-year-old Skolnick, a Yale-trained biochemist and a bioinformatician, was brought into Buffalo by New York's leaders hoping to boost the area economically by using a $200 million investment in bioinformatics as a catalyst. That may still happen, but it won't within the next year or two. And, it will take a special breed of those who are hardy enough to sit through the area's notorious lake-effect snows and cold.

Skolnik is apparently taking a pay cut to escape the cold winters of upstate New York, and perhaps the impossibly high expectations for biotech breakthroughs and bioresurgence in Buffalo.

According to news reports, Skolnick earned $345,000 annually at the University of Buffalo, but will be paid a salary of $225,000 a year to hold an endowed chair in Atlanta, according to coverage in Cox News. Additionally, Georgia will ante up $5 million for Skolnick's computing and lab equipment needs.

Skolnick will join a robust biotech community of high ambitions at Georgia Tech,and surrounding Emory University and the University of Georgia on his arrival at the first of the year.

Buffalo will continue to be cold.