Scripps Research professor Christopher Parker has been named the recipient of the 2026 American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Chemical Biology Early Career Award, which recognizes early-career investigators making an outsized impact on the field of chemical biology. It is jointly administered by the editor-in-chief of ACS Chemical Biology and the ACS’s Division of Biochemistry and Chemical Biology and is reserved for researchers who have started their independent research positions within the last 10 years.

“It is an honor to receive this award from the ACS, which recognizes the hard work and innovation from all members, past and present, from my group,” says Parker. “Our goal is to keep pushing the boundaries of what chemical proteomics can reveal about human disease and to develop the next generation of tools that could one day transform how we discover drugs.”

Most diseases are driven, at least in part, by proteins in the body that are malfunctioning, but developing drugs to address them requires first understanding how a protein could be targeted by therapeutic molecules. Parker’s lab develops chemical tools to answer that question directly inside living cells, where proteins exist in their natural environment. By deploying specially designed molecular probes, his team creates maps of actionable sites across thousands of human proteins where drug-like molecules could potentially bind, including many proteins that had previously been considered impossible to target.

The lab then uses those maps to build new tools for controlling protein behavior. Rather than simply blocking a protein as most drugs do, Parker’s team engineers molecules capable of more nuanced interactions, such as tagging a protein with a specific chemical signal or altering how it functions in the context of disease. This work has opened new avenues for studying and potentially treating conditions like cancer, as well as lupus and other autoimmune diseases.

Along with Professors Ben Cravatt and John Teijaro, Parker co-founded Belharra Therapeutics to accelerate this unique approach to drug discovery. He will formally receive the ACS Chemical Biology Early Career Award at the Spring ACS meeting in March 2026.