Jackson Chan leaves Garvan

Jackson Chan has lost his job as chief information officer at Garvan Institute of Medical Research, a role that he held since March last year.

Chan has left the medical research organisation following a review and restructure by new management, which resulted in 38 staff being made redundant.

The Australian Financial Review reported earlier this month that the majority of those redundancies were from the institute’s wholly-owned subsidiary Genome.One, which is struggling to raise capital. Set up in 2016, Genome.One is Australia’s first clinical whole genome sequencing service.

Chan, who is MBA-trained, told CIO Australia that he’s heading overseas with his family and will reassess his options and look for new opportunities when he’s back in Sydney next month.

While at Garvan, Chan united the organisation’s data intensive computer engineering (DICE) team and its IT function. He created a shared infrastructure role between both groups so they wouldn’t evolve into two separate technology functions. This led to far better efficiencies and ensured the IT group was more strategically aligned to Garvan’s research.

DICE primarily supports the research activities of the institute using high performance computing, cloud and big data technologies. Garvan is increasingly dealing with large amounts of data thanks to big advances in the speed and cost of reading DNA (genome sequencing).

Prior to Garvan, Chan spent just over two years as head of technology operations transformation at Vodafone Australia, moving up from role as head of transformation and managed service transition at the telco.

Between June 2012 and March 2013, he was head of technology at retailer Crazy John’s, a brand that was shut down in July 2014 when its 100,000 customers were offered a move to its parent brand, Vodafone.

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