Richard Scheller

Richard H. Scheller joined 23andMe in 2015 as Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Therapeutics. Under his leadership, 23andMe built a dedicated research and therapeutic development team that uses human genetic data as the starting point for identifying novel therapies for common and rare diseases. Richard was appointed to the board of directors in early 2019.

For 14 years Scheller was Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development, and member of both the Genentech and Roche executive committees. Prior to joining Genentech, Scheller was a professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University (1982-1994), and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1994 to 2001. Scheller has been an adjunct professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UC San Francisco since 2004. He is a member of the board of trustees at the California Institute of Technology.

Scheller’s research elucidating the molecular machinery and regulatory mechanism that underlie the release of neurotransmitter earned him the 2013 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2010 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and the 1997 US National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology.

Scheller is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Scheller holds a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry from University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellow in Molecular Neurobiology at Columbia University at the College of Physicians and Surgeons.