Dr. Peter G. Schultz has made many seminal contributions to the fields of chemical and synthetic biology, including the development and application of methods to expand 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. He earned his undergraduate (summa cum laude) and doctoral degrees at the California Institute of Technology. After postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Schultz joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985, where he was a chemistry professor, a principal investigator at 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. The following year, he was named president of the institute.

Schultz has founded nine biotech/tech companies that have pioneered the development and application of new technologies to challenges in human health and materials science. In 1999, he founded the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, serving as its director for more than 10 years. In 2012, he established CALIBR, a nonprofit biomedical research institute designed as a new model to accelerate the discovery of innovative medicines that is now an operating division of Scripps Research.

An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Schultz has co-authored more than 600 scientific publications and is active on many editorial and scientific advisory boards. He has trained in excess of 300 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom are on the faculties of major research institutions around the world. Schultz has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award, the Solvay Prize, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Award, the Heinrich Wieland Prize, and the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences.