5/17/2010

On June 4, 2010, at 11 a.m., Worcester Academy will graduate 148 students from eleven countries.

The school is honored to have as this year’s commencement speaker Nobel Prize-winner Craig C. Mello, PhD.  Dr. Mello's daughter is a member of the graduating class.

Craig C. Mello, PhD, is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine and Co-director of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Dr. Mello and his colleague Andrew Fire, PhD, of Stanford University, received the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), a natural gene silencing mechanism triggered by double-stranded RNA. RNAi provides both a powerful research tool for knocking out the expression of specific genes and opens a totally unanticipated window on gene regulation.

Dr. Mello holds a BS in Biochemistry from Brown University and a PhD in Cellular and Developmental Biology from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before joining UMass Medical School in 1994.