The American Institute of Chemists (AIC) has awarded Scripps Research President and CEO Pete Schultz, PhD, the 2024 AIC Gold Medal for his contributions in chemical and synthetic biology.
The AIC Gold Medal has been presented jointly with the Science History Institute since 2003, and first began honoring accomplishments in chemistry and chemical engineering in 1926. Gold medalists are recognized each spring and receive Life Fellowship in the institute for their achievements. The 2024 AIC Gold Medal was presented to Schultz during an awards ceremony on May 8, 2024, in Old City Philadelphia.
Schultz, who is also the L.S. “Sam” Skaggs Presidential Chair, has made many seminal contributions to the fields of chemical and synthetic biology. His work has led to the expansion of the genetic code of living organisms, the discovery of catalytic antibodies, and the development and application of molecular diversity technologies to address problems in chemistry, materials science and medicine.
Schultz founded nine biotech and tech companies that have pioneered technologies to improve human health and materials science. In 1999, Schultz founded the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, where he led the creation of automated high throughput methods in drug discovery, genomics, and structural biology. In 2012, he established Calibr, now the Calibr-Skaggs Institute for Innovative Medicines, to accelerate drug discovery for critical unmet needs through its “bench to bedside” engine.
The co-author of more than 600 scientific publications, Schultz is active on many editorial and scientific advisory boards. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation, the Solvay Prize, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the Arthur C. Cope Award of the American Chemical Society, the Heinrich Wieland Prize and the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences. Additionally, he has trained more than 300 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom now serve at research institutes around the globe.
Schultz earned his undergraduate (summa cum laude) and doctoral degrees at the California Institute of Technology. After postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985, where he was a chemistry professor, a principal investigator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He joined Scripps Research in 1999 and was appointed chief executive officer in 2015.
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