Brenda Schulman elected to the Royal Society as Foreign Member
Brenda Schulman, director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, has been elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society in London, United Kingdom.
The Royal Society has elected Brenda Schulman, director of the department “Molecular Machines and Signaling” at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, as a new Foreign Member. The Society, founded in 1660, is one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific academies in the world, committed to the highest quality of science and its use for the benefit of humanity. Schulman is recognized for her groundbreaking work on the molecular machineries that cells use to tag and destroy unwanted proteins – a system with far-reaching implications for understanding cancer, neurodegeneration, and other diseases.
Schulman’s Research
How do cells decide which proteins to keep and which to eliminate? And how do they carry out this destruction rapidly and precisely? Brenda Schulman, head of the department "Molecular Machines and Signaling" at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, has been working on these research questions for nearly three decades. Together with her team, Schulman uses multidisciplinary approaches to uncover molecular pathways and mechanisms coupling cellular cues with protein degradation machinery.
Cells use a small protein called ubiquitin as a molecular tag. When ubiquitin is attached to another protein, it can mark that protein for destruction or change its function. This tagging process is carried out by a cascade of enzymes. Which proteins get tagged, and for what purpose, depends on which of more than 600 different enzymes are at work at any given time or place in a cell. Errors in this enzyme system cause numerous diseases, including cancer, neurodegeneration, and developmental disorders.
Schulman and her team have revealed how many of these tagging enzymes recognize their targets and attach ubiquitin to them. Understanding these mechanisms is essential for deciphering how cells maintain order and what goes wrong in disease. It also provides the foundation for a promising new class of medicines that harness the cell's own protein destruction machinery to eliminate disease-causing proteins — an approach known as targeted protein degradation. Over the last few years, Schulman's group has also expanded into new directions: how this tagging system controls metabolism, and how the protein destruction machinery is organized inside cells.
About Brenda Schulman
Schulman studied biology at Johns Hopkins University and received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996. She then pursued postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In 2001, she joined St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and held the Joseph Simone Endowed Chair of Basic Research. In 2017, she moved to Germany to become a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, where she is also an Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich.
Schulman is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, EMBO, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Among her awards are the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG), an Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine, and a Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine.
About the Royal Society
The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship and one of the oldest scientific institutions in the world, founded in 1660. Its mission is to recognize, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. The Society now comprises approximately 1,900 outstanding scientists, engineers, and technologists, including around 85 Nobel Laureates. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process based on excellence in science. Each year up to 109 new Fellows including up to 24 Foreign Members are elected from candidates proposed by the existing Fellowship. Further information: https://royalsociety.org/
