In a letter to the Division of Biology and Medicine community on Tuesday, Oct. 13, Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Mukesh K. Jain, MD, announced that Brown alumnus and Nobel Laureate Craig C. Mello, PhD, will be joining the Division as a professor of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry and a faculty member at the Giuliani RNA Center. Dr. Mello will move his research program to the William A. and Ami Kuan Danoff Life Sciences Laboratories in summer 2027.
Dr. Mello earned his Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and molecular biology from Brown in 1982 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1990. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before moving to the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, where he was most recently the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine and distinguished professor of RNA therapeutics and molecular medicine.
In 2006, Dr. Mello shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Z. Fire for the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), first reported in 1998. Their work showed that double-stranded RNA can trigger potent, sequence-specific silencing of matching cellular RNAs. In effect, RNAi acts as a programmable molecular search system: a short RNA sequence guides the cell’s silencing machinery to complementary RNA molecules, allowing researchers to silence virtually any gene. The discovery transformed the study of gene function and opened a new therapeutic modality in which synthetic RNAs can be designed to silence disease-causing genes. RNAi has since led to multiple approved medicines and a broad pipeline of therapies in development. It also helped establish RNA-guided control as a fundamental mechanism governing gene expression.
Dr. Mello was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator from 2000 to 2024 and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He co-founded the UMass RNA Therapeutics Institute in 2008 and helped to grow it into a world-class center for fundamental RNA biology and the development of RNA-based therapeutics. His work has been recognized with many of science’s highest honors, including the Wiley Prize, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, and the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize. He received an honorary doctorate from Brown in 2007. Dr. Mello has helped found multiple biotech ventures that focus on RNA-guided treatments for a variety of genetic diseases.
Dr. Mello will continue his long-standing commitment to rigorous fundamental science and looks forward to drawing on the interdisciplinary strengths of the Danoff Laboratories and the broader Brown community to explore how organisms store, process and transmit biological information, and how those insights can be harnessed to improve human health. He is also keen to engage with undergraduate and graduate students, both in the classroom and laboratory, to inspire the next generation of curiosity-driven scientists and physicians.