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

Bradley Moore is a professor of marine chemical biology in the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He also is professor and 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 microbial 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 microbial compounds, including the potent oncology agents salinosporamide A and didemnin, the promising antibiotic taromycin A, the coral settlement cue tetrabromopyrrole, and PBDE environmental toxins.

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 and the American Academy of Microbiology, the former president of the American Society for Pharmacognosy, and the editorial chair of the journal Natural Product Reports. Moore has been a PI on NIH/NSF-funded grants for over 15 years totaling approximately $20M and is the founding Director of the NIEHS/NSF-sponsored Scripps Center for Oceans and Human Health since 2012.