Illumina: Jay Flatley, John Thompson

Illumina announced that Jay Flatley will step down from the company's board of directors and John Thompson will replace him as chairman of the board, effective May 26.

"This is part of a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process," Illumina said in a statement.

Flatley led Illumina as CEO from 1999 to 2016 and served as executive chair from 2016 to 2019. He spearheaded Illumina's acquisition of Solexa and with it the underlying technology for Illumina's next-generation sequencing systems.

Thompson has served on Illumina's board since 2017. He is a venture partner at Lightspeed Ventures. Previously, he was CEO at Virtual Instruments and Symantec and held senior roles in sales, marketing, and software development in a 28-year career at IBM. Thompson is also chair of Microsoft's board, a position he has held since 2014, and serves on the boards of privately-held Rubrik and Seismic Software. He holds a master's degree in management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.