At the end of March, the Academic Committee of the Key Laboratory Animal Models and Human Disease Mechanisms (AMHD) met to discuss plans for the upcoming year. The committee chose to appoint Dr. Xu Lin as the director of the AMHD for the upcoming year, a position he has occupied since 2008. Drs. Chen Ce-Shi and Zheng Yong-Tang meanwhile were selected to serve as Deputy Directors for the AMHD.

The AMHD was established in December 2008, and serves one of three key research areas of the Kunming Institute of Zoology (KIZ), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), focused on establishing and improving primate disease models, elucidating the underlying mechanisms of common diseases, as well as designing and screening drugs, and evaluating pharmacodynamics, with special attention to work on HIV/ AIDS, depression, drug addiction, as well as other related diseases. The AMHD has enjoyed considerable success this last year, including the publication of the “Genome of the Chinese Tree Shrew,” an increasingly popular animal model, in Nature Communications 4 (doi:10.1038/ncomms2416) earlier this year.

The decisions of the Academic Committee (listed below) will stand from March 20, 2013.