UMass Medical School's Craig Mello elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Mello, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, holds his BS in biochemistry from Brown University and his PhD in Cellular and Developmental Biology from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before coming to Worcester to join UMMS in 1995. He is also a 1995 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. His work so inspired philanthropists John F. “Jack” Blais and wife Shelley that they contributed a $3 million gift in October 2003 to establish the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine to assist Mello in his future research endeavors. In addition to being honored with election to the AAAS and the National Academy of Science (Fire in 2004 and Mello in 2005), Mello and Fire’s discovery has garnered numerous honors, including the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 2003. That same year, they were awarded the prestigious Wiley Prize in the Biomedical Sciences. Their RNAi finding was named the 2002 “Breakthrough of the Year” by Science magazine and, remarkably, was also on Science’s list of the top 10 scientific advances in 2003. The pair received the 2005 Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Medical Research from Brandeis University and the 2005 Gairdner International Award, which is nationally sponsored by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Government of Canada’s agency for health research.

This year’s new AAAS Fellows include, among others, U.S. Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice John Paul Stevens; 2004 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, Linda Buck, who discovered a molecular understanding of the sense of smell; computer company founders Michael Dell (Dell Computer), and Charles M. Geschke and John E. Warnock (Adobe Systems, Inc.); two-time cabinet secretary and former White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III; astronomer Adam Riess, who contributed to the discovery of dark energy in the universe; Academy Award-winning filmmakers Ethan and Joel Cohen; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edwards P. Jones; and blues guitarist B.B. King, with whom Mello shared the stage as the 2007 Brown University Commencement speakers. Honorary Foreign Members include Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

“The Academy honors excellence by electing to membership remarkable men and women who have made preeminent contributions to their fields, and to the world,” said Academy President Emilio Bizzi. “We are pleased to welcome into the Academy these new members to help advance our founders’ goal of ‘cherishing knowledge and shaping the future.’”