Phillip Zamore

Professor Philip Zamore is currently the Gretchen Stone Cook Professor of Biomedical Sciences and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Professor Zamore is a molecular biologist and geneticist, his research focuses on dissecting the RNAi and miRNA pathways, and understanding the molecular mechanisms of post-translational gene regulation.

After receiving a PhD from Harvard in 1992, Zamore began work in the laboratory of Dr. Lehmann at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, where he carried out the first detailed biochemical characterization of Pumilio, a developmental regulatory protein.

In 1999, Zamore joined the Bartel lab as a post-doctoral fellow. In his highly cited 2000 paper, "RNAi: double-stranded RNA directs the ATP-dependent cleavage of mRNA at 21 to 23 nucleotide intervals" (Zamore PD, et al., Cell 101[1]: 25-33), Zamore showed that small RNAs are produced from the double-stranded RNA that triggers RNA interference, and that this can be modelled in vitro.

Over the last decade, his laboratory has shown how RNA interference works at the molecular level, identifying that small double-stranded RNAs called siRNAs, generated from longer double-stranded RNA by the enzyme Dicer, direct silencing of targeted genes.

In 2002, Zamore became a W.M. Keck Foundation Young Scholar in Medical Research. In April 2009, the ASBMB honored Dr. Zamore with the Schering-Plough Institute Award. He has also recently been appointed co-Director of the UMass RNA Therapeutics Institute, along with Craig Mello, Victor Ambros and Melissa Moore.