Keynote Speaker
Dr. Craig Cameron Mello is an American biologist and Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Mello has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut on October 18, 1960. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the US from the Portuguese islands of Azores.
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rsued biochemistry and molecular biology as his major at Brown University. He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 1982. After completing his studies at Brown, Mello went to Boulder, Colorado for graduate studies. One of his instructors was David Hirsh. He joined Hirch´s lab in 1982. During his first year in Boulder, David Hirsh decided to take a position in the industry. Thus, Mello moved to Harvard University where he could continue his research with Dan Stinchcomb, who was starting up an independent lab. Mello completed his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1990. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center of Dr. James Priess. In 2006, Mello received the Nobel Prize for research work that began in 1998, when Mello and Andrew Z. Fire, along with their colleagues (SiQun Xu, Mary Montgomery, Stephen Kostas, and Sam Driver), published a paper in the journal Nature detailing how tiny segments of RNA convince the cell into destroying the gene's messenger RNA (mRNA) before it can produce a protein - effectively neutralizing specific genes.