Dear friends,
While ABRF is built as a professional society for shared resources, for many of us ABRF has become much more. It has become an extended family full of dear friends and some of the most wonderful people. It is in this light that with great sadness I write to tell you that our friend, Tom Volkert, died unexpectedly on Friday. Tom was never an officer of ABRF or head of a committee, but he was as much a part of ABRF as anyone I knew.
Tom was the director of the Genome Technology Core at the Whitehead Institute. I met Tom 20 years ago when I started my postdoc working on early systems biology methods and worked closely with him and his team on ChipChip, ChIPseq and other early sequencing methods. When I was just starting my core at MIT, the first person I went to for advice was Tom. Among the many things we discussed was he told me the most important thing to do was to join ABRF. One of my fondest memories was that very first meeting in Memphis, hanging out on Beale St in the evening with Tom listening to the blues. In the many years since, it has been a true privilege to work with Tom as a colleague and as a friend.
I ask that you please hold Tom's family - his wife Angela and their sons - in your thoughts during this difficult time. I will share any information about services, memorials, etc., with the ABRF family as soon as I can. Please feel free to share your thoughts and memories here about Tom.
May his memory be a blessing,
-Stuart Levine
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Stuart Levine
MIT BioMicro Center Director
Koch Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge MA
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