Stuart Schreiber
Member of the Scientific Advisory Board

Stuart Schreiber is a founding core member of the Broad Institute. He was the founding director in 1997 of Harvard’s Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology, which provided the origins of the Broad Institute’s Chemical Biology Program and which has since been incorporated into the Chemical Biology and Therapeutic Sciences (CBTS) Program. His research integrates chemical biology and human biology to advance both our understanding of chemistry and biology, and the discovery of novel therapeutics. He is known for his use of small molecules to explore biology and medicine, and for his role in the development of the field of chemical biology.

With Jerry Crabtree in 1991, his lab mapped the first membrane-to-nucleus signaling pathway (calcium–calcineurin–NFAT). His lab co-discovered mTOR in 1994 (simultaneously with the Sabatini lab) and helped illuminate the mTOR-dependent nutrient-response signaling network. His lab discovered histone deacetylase (HDAC) and, together with David Allis and Michael Grunstein in 1996, the role of chromatin marks in gene expression.

His research illustrated that many small molecules are bifunctional and act by inducing proximity of signaling proteins, which he coined ‘molecular glues’. The discovery of molecular glues and development of chemical inducers of proximity led conceptually to the targeted degradation of proteins by small-molecule ‘PROTACs’. These efforts accelerated the development of many additional widely used drugs and more generally the field of chemical biology. His development of diversity-oriented synthesis, and integration of human biology and chemistry to guide the development of safe and effective therapeutics, among others, have dramatically advanced chemical biology and contributed to its becoming a vibrant area of life science research.

Schreiber is the Morris Loeb Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Wolf Prize in Chemistry.

Schreiber was a professor at Yale University from 1981 to 1988, and became a member of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in 1988. He received his B.A. in chemistry from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard University.