Peter G. Schultz

Peter G. Schultz (born June 23, 1956) is an American chemist. He is currently the CEO and Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, the founder and former director of GNF, and the founding director of the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr), established in 2012. In August 2014, Nature Biotechnology ranked Peter Schultz the #1 top translational researcher in 2013.

Professor Schultz has authored more than 500 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, including many in the most prestigious scientific journals: Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He has trained over 300 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom are on the faculties of major research universities. Professor Schultz is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA (1993), the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (1998), and many editorial and scientific advisory boards. He is a founder of Affymax Research Institute, Symyx Technologies, Syrrx, Kalypsys, Phenomix, Ilypsa, Ambrx, and Wildcat Discovery Technologies, pioneers in the application of high throughput technologies to chemistry, biology, medicine, and materials science.

Academic career

Schultz completed his undergraduate degree from Caltech in 1979 and continued there for his doctoral degree (in 1984) with Professor Peter Dervan. His thesis work focused on the generation and characterization of 1,1-diazenes and the generation of sequence-selective polypyrrole DNA binding/cleaving molecules. He then spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Christopher Walsh before joining the chemistry faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He became a Principal Investigator of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1985 and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1994. In 1999 Schultz moved to The Scripps Research Institute and also became founding Director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation(GNF), which was initiated purely as a genomic research outlet of Novartis, but which grew during Schultz's tenure to include a significant drug discovery effort and more than triple the number of intended employees (currently over 500 people). In March 2010, he left GNF to return to the non-profit sector and founded the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr) in March 2012.

Awards

• 2013 The Laureate Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize
• 2006 ACS Arthur C. Cope Award
• 2002 Paul Erhlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Award
• 2000 ACS Alfred Bader Award in Bioorganic Chemistry
• 1998 NSF Alan T. Waterman Award
• 1994 Wolf Prize in Chemistry
• 1992 UC Berkeley College of Chemistry Teaching Award
• 1990 ACS Award in Pure Chemistry