Peter Schultz

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Peter Schultz (born June 23, 1956 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American research chemist. He is Scripps Family Chair Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California and Director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation.

Schultz received his Ph.D. at Caltech in 1984 with Peter Dervan, Bren Professor of Chemistry. The title of his thesis: Ground and excited state studies of persistent 1,1-diazines; Design of sequence specific DNA cleaving molecules. He then undertook post-doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and held a positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Schultz, simultaneously with now TSRI president Richard Lerner, first demonstrated that antibodies could selectively catalyze chemical reactions. He has successfully incorporated a 21st amino acid into biological systems, most notably E. coli and yeast, to synthesize proteins with arbitrary functionality. His group also discovered a small molecule, reversine, that can be used to control stem cell dedifferentiation.

Schultz was awarded membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He shared with Lerner the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1994 and was named California Scientist of the Year in 1995. In 2006 he was the winner of the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Award for organic chemistry.

Schultz has founded a number of biotechnology companies, including Symyx Technologies.