News and Publications

Peter G. Schultz, Ph.D., Joins TSRI Staff

eter G. Schultz, Ph.D., a former professor of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley, principal investigator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has joined the staff of The Scripps Research Institute as a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. He also has been appointed Director of Novartis' Institute for Functional Genomics, a discovery-focused research institute funded by the Novartis Foundation.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Schultz holds B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985.

According to TSRI President Richard A. Lerner, M.D., "Peter Schultz is a very important addition to our faculty. His prodigious talents are well known in the scientific community and we look forward to many more contributions to the body of scientific knowledge based on his work and insights. He is one of the country's most creative and dynamic young scientists."

Schultz's research interests combine the tools and principles of chemistry with the molecules and processes of living cells to create molecules with new properties and functions found neither in nature nor the test tube. By studying the structure and function of the resulting molecules, he is providing new insights into the molecular mechanisms of complex biological and chemical systems.

His scientific inquiries have shown that the combinatorial diversity of the immune response can be chemically reprogrammed to generate selective enzyme-like catalysts, work for which he and Dr. Lerner have been recognized with such prestigious honors as the Wolf Prize and the California Scientist of the Year Award. They have developed antibodies to catalyze a wide array of chemical and biological reactions; in a number of cases rates comparable to those of naturally occurring enzymes have been achieved. Most recently, Schultz has focused on in vitro evolution methods that involve the development of novel chemical screens and selections for identifying mutants with enhanced function. His work also is providing insights into the mechanisms and evolution of catalytic function in nature. Extending molecular diversity to material science, Schultz recently developed a new technology for the parallel synthesis, processing and screening of large libraries of solid state inorganic and organic materials and devices -- electronic, magnetic, optical and catalytic -- for new properties. In addition, he has developed a general biosynthetic method to site-specifically incorporate unnatural amino acids into proteins. This new technology not only allows scientists for the first time to carry out detailed physical organic studies on proteins, it also may provide a new generation of proteins with properties not restricted by the naturally occurring twenty amino acids. Schultz has been recognized for his work with numerous honors and awards, including the Alan T. Waterman Award, National Science Foundation; Arthur C. Cope Award, American Chemical Society; American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry; membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, American Chemical Society; DuPont Merck Young Investigator Award, The Protein Society; Wolf Prize in Chemistry; and California Scientist of the Year.