Craig Mello

Craig is the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS). He was also designated an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2000, the third HHMI researcher selected at UMMS. HHMI is a $13 billion medical research organization that employs more than 350 eminent researchers at 72 medical schools, universities and research institutes worldwide. Craig and his colleague Andrew Fire, Ph.D., formerly of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of RNA interference (RNAi). They demonstrated that a certain form of RNA had the unanticipated property of silencing — or interfering with — the expression of a gene, ultimately halting the progression of the invading viral infection. Atalanta’s science is founded on this award-winning RNAi mechanism. Craig holds his B.S. in biochemistry from Brown University and his Ph.D. in cellular and developmental biology from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before coming to UMMS in 1995. He is also a 1995 Pew Scholar in the biomedical sciences.