Robin C. Stracey has been appointed president and COO at Applied Imaging Corp., a Santa Clara, Calif., supplier of automated imaging systems for fluorescence and brightfield microscopy applications. Stracey was previously vice president and general manager of the chromatography and mass spectrometry business unit of Thermo Electron Corp. . . . The A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in St. Petersburg, recently ordered an Aixtron AIX 200 metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) reactor for the development of long-wavelength laser structures, primarily to grow III-V nitride materials for mid-infrared light sources, detectors used in ecology investigations and medical devices. Aixtron is a German supplier of equipment for semiconductor epitaxy that is used to manufacture components including lasers, light-emitting diodes, detectors and vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers for fiber optic communication systems.