Harold (Hal) Moses, M.D., Ingram Professor of Cancer Research and director emeritus of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC), has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Moses, professor and interim chair of Cancer Biology, is among 175 academic leaders named to the 2016 class of NAI Fellows.
Philippe Fauchet, Ph.D., dean of Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, also was named to this year’s class of academic inventors.
Election to NAI Fellow status is a professional distinction awarded to academic leaders who have demonstrated a “spirit of innovation” in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible positive impact on society.
Moses has devoted much of his career to basic research on growth factors and tumor suppressor genes. He and his colleagues were among the first to isolate and purify transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) and discovered that it could inhibit cell proliferation. This work had a major impact on scientists’ understanding of the disruption in the balance between positive and negative growth regulators as an underlying cause of cancer.
Moses, who helped launch VICC and led it to National Cancer Institute Comprehensive Cancer Center status, has received many awards for his research, including the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research Award, and he is an elected fellow of the American Association for Cancer Research Academy. He holds a U.S. patent and has more than 300 peer-reviewed publications.
He has served as president of AACR and president of the Association of American Cancer Institutes (AACI). Moses is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and was founding chair of the Academy’s National Cancer Policy Forum. He has served on the editorial board of 13 journals.
With the election of the 2016 class, there are now 757 NAI Fellows representing 229 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes. The 2016 fellows are named inventors on 5,437 U.S. patents, bringing the collective patents held by all NAI Fellows to more than 26,000.
The new class of NAI Fellows will be inducted in April 2017 during the Sixth Annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston.
