Caspary Auditorium
The Rockefeller University
East 66th Street and York Avenue
New York City

Peter G. Schultz combines the tools and principles of chemistry with the molecules and processes of living cells to create molecules with properties and functions not yet found in nature. By studying the structure and function of the resulting molecules, Schultz gains new insights into the molecular mechanisms of complex biological and chemical systems. Schultz will present several examples of the synergistic use of biology and chemistry, from the generation of selective biological catalysts and organisms with expanded genetic codes, to genomics, drug discovery and materials science.

Schultz completed undergraduate and graduate work at the California Institute of Technology. His thesis work, done with Peter B. Dervan, resulted in the first synthetic molecules that sequence-selectively cleave DNA. In 1985, after postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he was professor of chemistry, principal investigator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Schultz joined the faculty of Scripps in 1999. Also that year he became the director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in La Jolla, California.

Schultz was a founding scientist of Affymax Research Institute and is a cofounder of Symyx Technologies, Syrrx, Kalypsys, Phenomix and most recently Ambrx. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine, he has received the Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation, the 1994 Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the 2003 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize.

The Jerry A.Weisbach Memorial Lecture, which is sponsored by the Pels Family Center for Biochemistry and Structural Biology, was endowed by Weisbach in 1999. Weisbach, who died in 2002, was director of technology transfer at Rockefeller University from 1988 to 1994 after a long career in the pharmaceutical industry, first at the company now known as GlaxoSmithKline in Philadelphia and later at the Parker Davis Research Division of the former Warner Lambert Company (now part of Pfizer).

For more information, please call Ms. Gloria Phipps at (212) 327-8967.

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