Home ASBMB Annual Meeting Program Featured speakers

Featured speakers

Each year, ASBMB’s program features outstanding scientists who are driving biochemistry and molecular biology forward and making future discoveries and applications possible. Attend the 2025 ASBMB Annual Meeting and hear from this year’s lecturers, including leading researchers, innovators, pioneers and emerging scientists across all parts of the field. Learn about essential, novel fundamental findings; translational opportunities; and the career journeys that will inspire current and future generations of researchers.

Special sessions

Persistence and serendipity in science: a poker analogy

Melissa J. Moore

Professor, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
Chief Scientific Officer emerita, Moderna

Success in poker requires taking risks based on incomplete information, reassessing as new information emerges, perseverance in the face of adversity and a healthy dose of luck. The same is true in scientific research. I will speak to how persistence and serendipity helped define my career and why understanding poker fundamentals can up your scientific game.

Speaker bio

Melissa J. Moore is a distinguished professor and industry executive. She ran a research lab funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and National Institutes of Health focused on post-transcriptional regulation of mammalian gene expression for 23 years at Brandeis University and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School before joining Moderna to serve as its chief science officer for almost seven years.

Moore is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner of the 2011 ASBMB William C. Rose Award and winner of the 2021 RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award.

She sits on the boards of several biotech companies, including Chroma Medicine and Tessera Therapeutics, and serves in multiple consulting roles.

Moore earned her Ph.D. in biological chemistry and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Novel GABA aminotransferase and ornithine aminotransferase inactivators as potential new treatments for epilepsy, pain and hepatocellular carcinoma

Richard Silverman

Professor, Northwestern University

GABA aminotransferase, which degrades the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, leads to a decrease in brain GABA levels, which is a cause for epilepsy and neuropathic pain. Ornithine aminotransferase produces L-glutamate, which is converted to L-glutamine, an amino acid important to the growth of hepatocellular carcinoma. This lecture will present the designs and mechanisms of inactivation of these two enzymes by potential new drug molecules, two of which have been in clinical trials.

Speaker bio

Richard Silverman is the Patrick G. Ryan/Aon Professor in the department of chemistry at Northwestern University, where his lab focuses on finding novel inhibitors of enzymes to treat central nervous system disorders (including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body dementia, cerebral palsy, epilepsy and neuropathic pain) and cancer (including melanoma and hepatocellular carcinoma).

Silverman invented the drug pregabalin, trade name Lyrica, which treats fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain and epilepsy. This drug binds the alpha2-delta subunit of presynaptic voltage-gated calcium channels in the central nervous system and modulates excitatory neurotransmitter release, including glutamate, substance-P, norepinephrine and calcitonin gene related peptide.

Silverman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In addition, he received the Centenary Prize, the Perkin Medal, the Arthur C. Cope Senior Scholar Award, the Tetrahedron Prize, Creative Invention Award, Israel Chemical Society Prize, Smissman Award, Hershberg Award, and was inducted into the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame of the American Chemical Society.

He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University.