Marine chemical biologist Bradley S. Moore. Photo by Erik Jepsen, UC San Diego Publications

Bradley Moore is a Distinguished Professor of Marine Chemical Biology and Director of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He also is Distinguished Professor and former chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences where he holds a joint faculty appointment.

Moore’s scientific interests focus on chemically exploring and genetically exploiting marine natural products, primarily as drug leads and environmental toxins. His group employs a multidisciplinary approach connecting genes to molecules, and over the years has developed numerous genome mining techniques that are now standard in the biosynthetic community. Moore established biosynthetic pathways to numerous marine bacterial compounds, including the potent oncology agents salinosporamide A and didemnin, the promising antibiotic taromycin A, the coral settlement cue tetrabromopyrrole, and PBDE environmental toxins. His lab also established genome mining approaches with diverse marine algae and marine invertebrates such as the neurotoxin domoic acid from diatoms, diverse bioactive terpenoids from seaweeds, corals, and sponges, and the giant polyether prymnesin from golden algae.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Moore received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Hawaii. He was a National Institutes of Health predoctoral training fellow in biotechnology at the University of Washington, where he received a PhD in bioorganic chemistry. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in bioorganic chemistry at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). He held professorships at the University of Washington and the University of Arizona before joining UC San Diego in 2005.

Moore is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Society for Pharmacognosy; the former president of the American Society for Pharmacognosy; and an Associate Editor of the ACS journal Organic Letters. Moore has been a PI on NIH/NSF-funded grants for over 20 years totaling >$30M and is the founding Director of the NIEHS/NSF-sponsored Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health since 2012.