John Schneekloth

John Schneekloth, Jr., Jay, is a Senior Investigator and head of the Chemical Genetics Section in the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health in Frederick, MD. Dr. Schneekloth has an A.B. in Chemistry from Dartmouth College, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, he began his independent career at the NIH in 2011.

Dr. Schneekloth’s research focuses on chemical biology approaches to target RNA and DNA. The Schneekloth laboratory has pioneered the use of small molecule microarrays as a high throughput platform for the discovery and characterization of RNA-binding small molecules. His work has emphasized the discovery of new chemical and biophysical techniques to understand the selectivity and specificity of molecular interactions with nucleic acids. These efforts enable the development of chemical probes to investigate the role of RNA in diseases such as cancer. His research focuses on targeting challenging, therapeutically valuable nucleic acid targets in cancer such as MYC- and RAS-family genes. Dr. Schneekloth is also active within the research community, where he is currently Secretary of the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry