Speakers

Melissa Moore, PhD, is a distinguished professor and industry executive with extensive expertise in post-transcriptional regulation of mammalian gene expression. After 23 years running an academic research laboratory at UMass Chan Medical School (19 of them as an HHMI Investigator), Moore moved to industry in 2016 to become the chief scientific officer of Platform Research at Moderna. After six-and-a-half years at Moderna, she retired in March 2023. She currently holds multiple board seats and engages in the creation and growth of new companies in the bioinformatics and mRNA medicine space.  

Moore is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award. She has been named one of the 100 Fiercest Women in Biotech, to the PharmaVoice 100, and one of the 100 people transforming business by Business Insider.

Victor J. Dzau, MD, is president of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), formerly the Institute of Medicine (IOM). In addition, he serves as vice chair of the National Research Council. Dzau is chancellor emeritus and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Duke University and the past president and CEO of the Duke University Health System. Previously, Dzau was the Hersey Professor of Theory and Practice of Medicine and chairman of medicine at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, as well as Bloomfield Professor and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University.

Dzau is an internationally acclaimed physician-scientist and leader whose work has improved health and medicine in the United States and globally. His seminal work in cardiovascular medicine and genetics laid the foundation for the development of the class of lifesaving drugs known as ACE inhibitors, used globally to treat hypertension and heart failure. Dzau pioneered gene therapy for vascular disease and was the first to introduce DNA decoy molecules in humans in vivo. His pioneering research in cardiac regeneration led to the Paracrine Hypothesis of stem cell action, and his recent strategy of direct cardiac reprogramming using microRNA. He maintains an active NIH-funded research laboratory. 

 As a visionary leader, Dzau has set an inspiring example, leading efforts to transform health and medicine and devoting his career to scientific innovation, global health, and equity.  He believes in the importance of discovery and translational research and the need for emerging science and technology to benefit all of society. Under his tenure, the NAM has launched important initiatives, including the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework, the International Human Gene Editing Initiative, the Action Collaborative on Translating Emerging Science, Technology, and Innovation and the State of US Biomedical Enterprise. The National Academies recently released the consensus study Charting a Future for Sequencing RNA and Its Modifications, which proposes a roadmap of innovation and advances to study RNA in biological systems and human diseases.  

Dzau has held numerous national leadership roles in biomedical research. He previously chaired the NIH Cardiovascular Disease Advisory Committee and currently chairs the NIH Cardiovascular Progenitor Cell Translational Consortium. He also served on the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director and the NHLBI Council. He chairs scientific advisory boards of biomedical research councils and institutes in UK, Singapore, Japan, Qatar, Canada, and elsewhere. 

Among his many honors and recognitions are the Max Delbrück Medal from Charité, Humboldt, and Max Planck, Germany, the Distinguished Scientist Award from the American Heart Association, Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the Henry Freisen International Prize, and Order of the Rising Sun (Japan). In 2019, he was named an Honorary Citizen of Singapore, the highest level of honor bestowed to a foreign citizen. He has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, the Japan Academy and others. He has received 21 honorary doctorates.

Jack Reed has represented Rhode Island in the United States Senate since 1997, following six years in the U.S. House of Representatives. A graduate of West Point and Harvard Law School, he serves as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and is a leading voice on defense and education policy.

Subra Suresh, PhD, is an engineer, materials scientist, and academic leader. He began his academic career at Brown in 1983 before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. He led MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering from 2000 to 2006, and served as dean of its School of Engineering. In 2010, he was appointed director of the National Science Foundation by President Barack Obama and was confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate. He served as NSF director until 2013, when he became president of Carnegie Mellon University. 

Suresh is one of a very small number of Americans to be elected to three branches of the U.S. National Academies (Science, Medicine, and Engineering), and the first and only university president to hold this distinction. He was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest honor accorded to a U.S. scientist, by President Joseph R. Biden in 2023.

Frank Doyle, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Engineering and the fourteenth provost of Brown University. As the University’s chief academic officer and chief budget officer, Doyle works closely with the president to advance the University’s mission of teaching, research, and service.

Mark Turco, MD, is the president and CEO of the Rhode Island Life Science Hub. Dr. Turco has served in leadership positions across the biomedical and life science sectors, including clinical medicine, academic research, and early-stage startups. As the Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Pennsylvania, he established the Center for Penn-Health Tech, a partnership between the engineering school and the School of Medicine to develop medical technologies. He has guided research teams and innovators through the process of company creation and complex regulatory approvals to launch new medical technologies in the marketplace. Most recently, he led two cardiovascular start-up companies that were acquired by larger public medical device companies.

Dr. Turco received his MD from the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. Dr. Turco is a Providence resident.

Bina Venkataraman ’02 is an executive, journalist, and science & innovation policy expert whose leadership roles have spanned The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Broad Institute, and the Obama White House. Since 2011, she has taught in the program on science, technology, and society at MIT.

Juan Alfonzo, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry and the Mencoff Family Director of the Brown RNA Center.  

Theonie Anastassiadis, PhD, joined Flagship Pioneering in 2018 after completing the Flagship Pioneering Fellowship. Theonie works as part of a venture-creation team to develop the science, intellectual property, and business strategy to found and grow Flagship’s next breakthrough startups. She is a co-founder and member of the founding team of the tRNA platform company Alltrna where she also serves as Chief Innovation Officer.

Before joining Flagship, Theonie received her PhD in cell and molecular biology with a focus in cancer biology from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research on replication fork dynamics in the context of cancer development and therapeutics was supported through multiple fellowships, including a 4-year NIH F31 NRSA Predoctoral Fellowship. Theonie also completed a Wharton Business Foundations Specialization and holds a BS in biology with honors from Haverford College.

Theonie’s work has resulted in multiple patents and publications, including articles in Nature Biotechnology, Molecular Cell, and Journal of Biological Chemistry. She was honored in 2022 in Endpoints News’ 20 under 40 list of the next generation of biotech leaders and in Boston Business Journal’s 40 under 40 list for successful professionals giving back to their community. She is a Business Advisory Board member of the Harvard Institute for RNA Medicine and a member of the Bioscience & Investor Inclusion Group (BIIG) Diverse Talent Network Group.

Tejal Desai, PhD ’94, is the Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering at Brown University.  Her research spans multiple disciplines, including materials engineering, cell biology, tissue engineering, and pharmacological delivery systems to develop new therapeutic interventions for disease. She seeks to design new platforms, enabled by advancements in micro and nanotechnology, to overcome existing challenges in therapeutic delivery.

She has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles and patents.  Her research efforts have earned recognition including Technology Review’s “Top 100 Young Innovators,” Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10, and the Dawson Biotechnology Award. She is president of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and is a fellow of AIMBE, IAMBE, CRS, and BMES.  In 2015, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and in 2019 to the National Academy of Inventors.

Allan Jacobsen, PhD, is a co-founder of PTC Therapeutics, Inc., and has served as a member of the board since its inception in 1998, and previously served as chairman of the board from 1998 to 2004. From 1994 to 2023, Dr. Jacobson was the chair of the Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, where he is currently the Gerald L. and Zelda S. Haidak Professor of Cell Biology. In 1982, Dr. Jacobson co-founded Applied bioTechnology, Inc., a biotechnology company, and served as its chairman until its sale in 1991. From 1987 to 1990, Dr. Jacobson served as special limited partner at Euclid Partners, a venture capital firm.

Dr. Jacobson received a PhD from Brandeis University in 1971 and has authored over 100 publications in the field of posttranscriptional control processes. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a corecipient of the 2023 Gruber Prize in Genetics.

Eckhard Jankowsky, PhD, is vice president of RNA science at Moderna Therapeutics. Eckhard has worked over the last three decades on RNA-related topics ranging from RNA chemistry and biochemistry to RNA biology. Before joining Moderna in 2022, Dr. Jankowsky was a professor and the director of the Center for RNA Science and Therapeutics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Dr. Jankowsky has published more than 100 research papers, reviews and book chapters, including high impact articles in Cell, Science, and Nature, and he has edited two books.

Todd M. Lowe, PhD, is a professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose research focuses on the biology of tRNAs and RNA modifications. His lab uses a combination of genomics and high-throughput RNA sequencing methods to discover and characterize novel RNA modification enzymes, as well as tRNAs and their derived small RNAs that regulate basic cell function in developmental, neural, immune, and other specialized cell types relevant to human disease. He also curates the Genomic tRNA Database (GtRNAdb), a widely used reference for tRNA genes across all domains of life.

Vasant Yadav, PhD, is chief technology officer, SVP, at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, where he leads the RNAi Platform Technology efforts, including siRNA designs and delivery approaches. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field of oligonucleotide therapeutics, focusing on delivery and mechanistic investigations. He joined Alnylam in early 2014 after 12 years at Sirna-Merck, where he focused on optimizing siRNA designs and conjugate-based delivery systems. He is co-inventor of multiple technologies, including ESC+ siRNA design, REVERSIR, GEMINI (Bis-RNAi), and extra-hepatic delivery approaches. His contributions with the team on potency and specificity of siRNAs are utilized in multiple approved RNAi drugs and the deep pipeline at Alnylam.

Yadav has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious journals such as Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research, three of which were recognized as “Paper of the Year” in the basic research category (2021, 2022, and 2024) by the Oligonucleotides Therapeutics Society.

Joe Buccina, MS, is policy and research director for the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, which is charged by Congress with examining the critical intersection of emerging
biotechnology and national security. He holds master of science degree in bioinformatics from The Johns Hopkins University and has held a variety of roles in biodefense and national security.

Sergej Djuranovic, PhD, is the Mencoff Family RNA Research Professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry at Brown University. He earned his BSc and MSc from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and his PhD from Eberhard Karls University and the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology at Tübingen, Germany. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, as well as a professor of cell biology and physiology at Washington University School of Medicine.

His work is associated with mechanisms by which microRNAs and RNA-binding proteins control gene expression at the level of translation as well as the role of RNA and protein sequence motifs that by quality control mechanisms shape gene expression, mRNA and protein stability.

His work spans multiple disciplines from biophysics, biochemistry and structural biology, to genetics, molecular and cell biology. Sergej holds several patents on the modulation of the gene expression and isolation of ribosomes and RNA molecules. He is a member of scientific advisory boards for multiple biopharmaceutical and biotech companies.

Mukesh K. Jain, MD, is the eighth dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University and the Frank L. Day Professor of Biology. His tenure as dean began March 1, 2022. A physician-scientist, Dean Jain is internationally recognized for studies that established a central role for Kruppel-like factors, a family of DNA transcription factors, in cardiovascular biology, innate immunity, and metabolism. Prior to his appointment at Brown, Dean Jain was chief academic officer at University Hospitals health system in Cleveland, vice dean for medical sciences at Case Western Reserve University, and Harrington Endowed Scientific Director of the Harrington Discovery Institute. 

Nationally, Jain’s clinical and academic contributions have been recognized through numerous honors including election to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation — an organization for which he is a past president— the Association of American Physicians, and the Association of University Cardiologists. 

Weihan Li, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry at Brown University. His laboratory investigates how cells control the spatial organization of gene expression. Using advanced RNA single-molecule imaging, biochemistry and quantitative modeling, the Li Lab studies how mRNAs and proteins are precisely localized within cells, and how their mislocalization contributes to disease.

Michael Littman PhD’96, is the University Professor of Computer Science and an associate provost at Brown University. He joined the Computer Science Department after ten years (including 3 as chair) at Rutgers University. His research in machine learning examines algorithms for decision-making under uncertainty.

Littman has earned multiple awards for teaching, and his research has been recognized with three best-paper awards on the topics of meta-learning for computer crossword solving, complexity analysis of planning under uncertainty, and algorithms for efficient reinforcement learning. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. In 2013, he was general chair of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and program co-chair of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference, and he served as program co-chair of ICML 2009.

Theresa Raimondo, PhD, is the Manning Assistant Professor of Engineering, with a secondary appointment in the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown.

Dr. Raimondo’s research is broadly focused on the design of targeted drug-delivery vectors and novel RNA-based therapeutics for applications in cancer, immunotherapy, and tissue regeneration. Her research primarily focuses on the development of novel lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for RNA-based therapies, and her work has contributed to the development of adjuvanted mRNA-based vaccines and siRNA-based cancer immunotherapies. By using engineering approaches to optimize LNP formulation as well as modulating RNA constructs (sequence and chemical modifications), Dr. Raimondo seeks to both better understand how RNA-LNPs modulate immunity and to use this understanding for the development of new therapies.

Jonathan Soderstrom, PhD, is a chief licensing advisor in the New York office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He is also a member of the technology transactions and the patents and innovations practice groups. Jon has spent over 40 years managing the commercialization of intellectual property created at major public and private research institutions.

Under Jon’s leadership for 25-plus years, Yale Ventures (formerly known as Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research) helped form over 75 new ventures including Achillion Pharmaceuticals, Arvinas, NextCure, Biohaven Pharmaceuticals, and Inozyme Pharma, which have collectively raised over $1 billion in professional venture capital.