Tom St. Dennis was named senior vice president, Etch and Front End Products groups, at Applied Materials Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based supplier of equipment and services to the global semiconductor industry. Most recently, St. Dennis was executive vice president and a member of the office of the CEO at Novellus Systems Inc. He was a senior executive at Applied Materials for seven years before departing in 1999 to become CEO of Wind River Systems, an embedded software company. . . . Edmund Optics of Barrington, N.J., a supplier of optics and optical components, has released its September 2005 catalog of more than 7200 products. It can be viewed at: www.edmundoptics.com/onlinecatalog/browse.cfm . . . Kevin Moynihan, a former executive at Cadence Design Systems Inc., has joined Gradient Design Automation Inc., of Santa Clara, as vice president of marketing. Gradient is a provider of electronic design automation software tools for nanometer-scale integrated circuit designs. . . . A Science in Practice grant will be awarded at the International Biotech & Lab Automation Europe (IBLA) conference for the biotechnology and robotic industries (formerly Lab Automation Europe), to be be held Nov. 15-16 in Olympia, London. Any practicing life scientist from academia, industry or government who pre-registers for and attends IBLA is eligible for the award, which may be used for the purchase of equipment, disposables, reagents, software or products from any IBLA exhibitor. Registration and entrance to the exhibition is free. For more information, visit: www.ibla.co.uk