August 14, 2018
Congratulations to James Moon, PhD, John Gideon Searle Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, U-M College of Pharmacy, who has won the 2018 AAPS Emerging Leader Award.

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) has honored James Moon, PhD, John Gideon Searle Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, with the 2018 AAPS Emerging Leader Award. This award recognizes scientists and pharmaceutical professionals who are early in the their careers – regardless of whether they work in an academic, industrial, government, or other setting – who have made a significant impact in the pharmaceutical sciences that promotes public health. AAPS sees these young scientists as future global leaders and wishes to encourage their work by bringing attention to it and holding them up as an example to other early career scientists.

Dr. Moon’s translational research program aims to develop novel strategies for improving vaccines and immunotherapies. His work has been published in Nature Materials, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications, PNAS, and Science Translational Medicine, and led to two new biotech companies, Vedantra Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA) and EVOQ Therapeutics (Ann Arbor, MI) that focus on clinical translation of new nano-vaccine technologies. Dr. Moon has received numerous awards, including 2017 Emerald Foundation Distinguished Investigator Award, 2016 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2016 DOD-CDMRP Career Development Award, and 2015 Melanoma Research Alliance Young Investigator Award.

“It is an honor and privilege to be recognized for the work that we do in the laboratory,” says Dr. Moon. “I want to thank all my lab members for their hard work and the College of Pharmacy for making this possible.”

Dr. Moon recently earned the Mid-Career Nanotechnology Scientific Award presented by the Applied Nanotechnology and Nanoscience International Conference. He is being recognized for his work on the development and application of nanotechnology for cancer immunotherapy at the conference this October in Berlin, Germany.

Dr. Moon received his BS in Bioengineering from University of California, Berkeley, obtained his PhD in Bioengineering from Rice University with Prof. Jennifer West. He completed his postdoctoral training with Prof. Darrell Irvine at MIT (HHMI).