Brenda Schulman

Brenda Schulman is a leading biochemist and structural biologist. She has substantially contributed to the characterization of ubiquitin-like proteins (UBLs). Her main interest is how ubiquitin-like proteins and ubiquitin are able to specifically modify certain substrates, and how they alter the functions of their targets to regulate biological processes.

Brenda is an elected member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and EMBO. She has been awarded several prizes including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine.

Brenda received her bachelor’s degree in biology from Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and her Ph.D. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and later at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Brenda joined the faculty at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in 2001 and held the Joseph Simone Endowed Chair of Basic Research as of 2014. She also became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2005. Brenda moved to the Max Planck Institute in 2017 and is currently the Director at the Institute of Biochemistry.