Stuart Schreiber: biology from a chemist's perspective. Interview by Joanna Owens

Stuart L. Schreiber is Morris Loeb Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He founded Harvard's ICCB and directs the NIH-funded Initiative for Chemical Genetics (ICG). He is also a faculty member of the Broad Institute, a joint initiative by Harvard University and MIT that is 'dedicated to leveraging different disciplines to create a new toolkit for genomic medicine'. Following doctoral studies at Harvard University in the laboratory of R. B. Woodward and Y. Kishi, he joined the faculty at Yale University in 1981, where he was promoted to Full Professor in 1986. In 1988, he returned to Harvard, where, in addition to his main roles described above, he is an affiliate of both the Harvard Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Harvard Medical School Department of Cell Biology. He is also a member of the Graduate Programs in Biophysics at Harvard University and in Immunology at the Harvard Medical School. In keeping with his multiple roles at Harvard, Schreiber is renowned for taking an integrative and systematic approach to exploring biology. His pioneering work in the field of chemical biology has resulted in the characterisation of many cellular pathways, including (in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University) the identification of the calcium-calcineurin-NFAT signalling pathway. His lab has developed several methodologies including diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) and in 2003 launched the Chembank public database (), a suite of informatic tools and databases to promote the use of chemical genetics. Schreiber has received many awards and honours including the Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (1997) and most recently the Society for Biomolecular Screening Achievement Award (2004). He has founded several successful biotechnology firms, including Vertex Pharmaceuticals in 1989, ARIAD Pharmaceuticals in 1991, and Infinity Pharmaceuticals in 2001. He was also founding editor of the journal Chemistry & Biology, which is now in its tenth year of publication.