Michelle Lynn Hall is currently the Senior Director of Novel Therapeutic Modalities at Eli Lilly, where she leads a team of chemists, engineers, and biologists in the discovery and development of nucleic-acid-based therapies. Immediately prior to joining Lilly, Michelle worked at Moderna, where she led a team of modelers studying mRNA therapeutics design and lipid nanoparticle delivery. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University where she developed a novel method to predict organic chemistry reactions and applied these to skills to a diverse set of problems ranging from materials science to biocatalysis. She then completed a joint postdoc at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and Yale University, where she studied computer-aided drug design. She subsequently worked at Schrödinger where she focused on molecular simulations, machine learning, and chemical biology. She is passionate about equity, diversity, inclusion, and awareness in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and has served as a mentor, champion and advocate for women and minorities throughout her career. As a native Texan, she has intolerably strong opinions about BBQ.