Peter Schultz

Peter Schultz, PhD, is the President and CEO of Scripps Research, holding the L.S. “Sam” Skaggs Presidential Chair in the Department of Chemistry. He has been a faculty member since 1999, previously at UC Berkeley. His research spans synthetic biology, genetic code expansion, and drug discovery, with a focus on engineering organisms and molecules for biological and medical applications.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Chemistry, California Institute of Technology (1984)
• B.S. in Chemistry, California Institute of Technology (1979)

Research Interests:

• Expanding genetic codes to incorporate noncanonical amino acids in organisms
• Engineering endosymbiotic systems to study mitochondrial evolution
• Developing small molecules for cancer, stem cell therapies, and neglected diseases
• Designing antibodies and CAR-T cells for targeted therapies

Article Trends: Recent work emphasizes small molecule therapies for cancer and fibrosis, synthetic biology applications in endosymbiosis, and genetic code expansion for protein engineering. Key themes include drug repurposing, targeted drug delivery, and molecular mechanisms of biological systems.

Awards:

• Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1994)
• National Academy of Sciences Member (1993)
• Paul Ehrlich-and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (2002)
• National Academy of Inventors Fellow (2015)

Advising & Grants: Supervises ~15 graduate students and postdocs annually. Secured funding from NSF, NIH, and industry partnerships. Over 85 former students hold academic positions globally.

Labs/Teams: Heads the Schultz Lab at the Chi-Huey Wong Laboratories, focusing on biologically inspired synthesis and translational research.