Peter G. Schultz

By Erik J. Larson, PhD

Schultz is the CEO and Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute. He is also founder and former director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF). In 2012, he founded the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr), and now serves as its director. Academically, Schultz received his undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Caltech in 1984.

Schultz has had a stellar career in chemistry both in academia and in scientific institutes like the vaunted Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which he joined as a Principal Investigator in 1985. He has also been a professor of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, and spent a year in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1994, he became an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Schultz has trained over 300 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows!

Schultz is a pioneer in what’s called “combinatorial chemistry,” where large numbers of compounds are compared in a single process, potentially speeding up discovery and verification of hypotheses. His work has sometimes been called “high-throughput” chemistry, referring to the advantages of using combinatorial methods in chemical analysis. Schultz’s interests are wide-ranging, and reach even investigation of cell-specialization and other areas typically thought of as part of biology. He is also known for developing DNA libraries, or phage display libraries, which have been used extensively in research and in industry. Schultz became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US in 1993. In 2006, he won the American Chemical Society’s Arthur C. Cope Award.

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