Michael W. Mosesson, MD, born in New York City during the Depression, attended school in Brooklyn, before matriculating at Brooklyn College and graduating cum laude with honors in Chemistry. He then attended medical school at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, graduating magna cum laude, followed by an internship in Medicine, Harvard service at Boston City Hospital. He then entered the US Public Health Service, serving at the Division of Biologics Standards (DBS) in Bethesda, Maryland, a Federal regulatory agency that was at that time a part of the NIH and later became a branch of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). At DBS, he worked with a young DBS scientist, John Finlayson, and began his research career. Following his Public Health Service tour, Mosesson completed Medical Residency training at Washington University, St. Louis (Barnes Hospital) and met with Sol Sherry, one of the pre-eminent leaders in the growing field of fibrinolysis and thrombosis. Sherry had assembled a strong group, including an ‘Enzymology’ section, and Mosesson did his postdoctoral fellowship in that section, working on the biology of fibrinogen, the molecule that occupied the rest of his career. In 1967, he joined the medical faculty at SUNY-Downstate Medical Center, pursuing his interests in intravascular thrombosis and fibrinolysis, and rising through the ranks to become Professor and Chief of the Hemostasis Section. Over the next 14 years, his investigations included work on the proteolytic degradation of fibrinogen, structural and ultrastructural studies of fibrinogen, fibronectin, and coagulation factors V and VIII. In 1981, Mosesson moved to Milwaukee to become Co-Chair of Medicine at the Milwaukee Clinical Campus of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine at Sinai Samaritan Medical Center and Director of the Winter Research Institute. In 1999, with increasing collaborations at BloodCenter of Wisconsin, he moved to the Blood Research Institute where he remains as Emeritus Senior Investigator.

Mosesson committed his career to all things fibrinogen, the protein responsible for clot formation; he worked to understand its structure and function, identify the molecules and mechanisms responsible for lysing fibrin clots, and the physical properties of fibrin clots and the molecules and mechanisms responsible for cross-linking fibrinogen/fibrin. He published more than 250 papers in the field and, like his mentor Sherry, Mosesson became a pre-eminent leader in his field. He was continuously funded by the NIH until his retirement in 2006. He chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Hemostasis in 1980 and was a member of NIH Review Committee B, the review panel for Program Project grants. He served two terms as Editor of Thrombosis Research, a term as section editor of Thrombosis and Hemostasis, and he was on the Editorial Boards of Haemostasis Research, Fibrinolysis, and the Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine. He was an elected member of the Standardization and Scientific Committee (SSC), of the International Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis (ISTH), chairing its Subcommittee on Fibrinogen from 1997-1999 and receiving that organization’s Distinguished Career Award in 2003. Finally, he was a founder of and served as President of the International Fibrinogen Research Society from 1990-2002.