Ben Cravatt, Ph.D., a nationally-recognized leader in bioorganic chemistry and enzymology, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical Physiology at The Scripps Research Institute and is a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. Dr. Cravatt's research group contains a broad range of experimental expertise, ranging from synthetic chemistry to molecular biology and mammalian physiology. His group has obtained fundamental insights into the workings of several important mammalian enzymes, including hydrolases involved in the neurobiology of pain and proteases associated with tumor progression. Dr. Cravatt has received several honors, including selection as a Searle Scholar and being named as one of Technology Review's Top 100 Young Innovators. Dr. Cravatt is also Director of the Helen L. Dorris Institute for the Study of Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders of Children and Adolescents. He received a Ph.D. from The Scripps Research Institute, and a B.S. in Biological Sciences and a B.A. in History from Stanford University.

Richard DiMarchi, Ph.D. holds the Linda and Jack Gill Chair in Biomolecular Science and is a Professor of Chemistry at Indiana University. He is a retired Group Vice President at Eli Lilly & Company, where he provided leadership for more than two decades in biotechnology, endocrine research, and product development. He currently serves as a co-founder and Board member of biotechnology companies Ambrx, Inproteo and Marcadia. Dr. DiMarchi previously served as a board member of the biotechnology trade group BIO and of Millennium BioTherapeutics. His current research focuses on the relationship of protein structure and function, with a particular interest in novel methods of macromolecular synthesis and drug delivery. Dr. DiMarchi contributed significantly to the discovery of Humalog® and to the commercial development of Humulin®, Humatrope®, Glucagon®, Xigris®, Forteo®, and Evista®. Humalog represents the first biosynthetic hormone optimized by rDNA technology approved as a human medicine and presently registers annual sales in excess of $1B. Dr. DiMarchi is a leading proponent for the integration of new technologies and approaches in pharmaceutical R&D, and an ardent supporter of molecular diversity.

S. Gail Eckhardt, M.D. is Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, where she also serves as Director of the Developmental Therapeutics and GI Malignancies Programs. Dr. Eckhardt previously served as Associate Director of Clinical Research and Director of the Drug Development Fellowship Training Program at the Cancer Therapy and Research Center's Institute for Drug Development in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Eckhardt is the Principal Investigator on two NIH grants involving early clinical trials research and has conducted many Phase I and II clinical trials. Dr. Eckhardt serves on numerous committees and study sections, including the GI Steering Committee of the Southwest Oncology Group, the ASCO Molecular Oncology Task Force, and the EORTC Early Clinical Trials Review Panel. In 2003, she was Chair of the ASCO Program Committee and currently serves as an external reviewer for the Drug Development Group, NCI. Dr. Eckhardt is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Clinical Cancer Research, and Investigational New Drugs.

Richard Lerner, M.D. directs all scientific activities at The Scripps Research Institute as its President, a position he has held since 1986. Dr. Lerner, whose 30-year career in biomedical research is notable for its broad scope, is well known for his innovative work in converting antibodies into enzymes, thus permitting the catalysis of chemical reactions previously considered impossible to achieve using classical chemical procedures. He has received an array of honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and he is the recipient of the Wolf Prize in Chemistry.

Peter Schultz, Ph.D. is the Director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation and a Scripps Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Schultz graduated summa cum laude from the California Institute of Technology in 1979 from which he received his Ph.D. in 1984, working with Professor Peter Dervan. He then spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Christopher Walsh before moving to the University of California, Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Schultz has made several major scientific contributions, including the discovery of catalytic antibodies, using a methodology that for the first time expands the genetic codes of living organisms, and the development and application of combinatorial methods in chemistry and biology, including the first generation of combinatorial materials libraries. Dr. Schultz has received numerous awards, including the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award (1988 ), the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry (1990), the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (1994), and the Paul Ehrlich Prize (2002). He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1993 and has also been a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences since 1998. Dr. Schultz is active on many editorial and scientific advisory boards. Dr. Schultz is a founding scientist of Affymax Research Institute and co-founder of Symyx, Syrrx, Kalypsys, Phenomix, Ambrx, Ilypsa and Wildcat Discovery.

Kevan Shokat, Ph.D., a leading investigator in chemical biology, is a Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Shokat's research focuses on the development of chemically-based tools to decipher signal transduction pathways on a genome-wide scale. Dr. Shokat and his colleagues have developed a method for producing small molecules specific for any target of interest in a signaling cascade by combining protein design and chemical synthesis. Dr. Shokat is the scientific cofounder of Cellular Genomics Inc. and of IntelliKine. Dr. Shokat is a Pew, Cottrell, Searle, and Glaxo-Wellcome Scholar as well as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and has received the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. He received a Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of California, Berkeley; completed postdoctoral work at Stanford in 1994; and went on to serve as Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Princeton University.