Brenda Schulman
Brenda Arlene Schulman is an American biochemist and structural biologist who directs the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. Her work studies ubiquitin-like proteins, a group that modifies other proteins to change their function.
She was born in Tucson, Arizona. Schulman earned a BS in biology from Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and a PhD in biology from MIT in 1996 under Peter S. Kim. She did postdoctoral research with Ed Harlow at Massachusetts General Hospital and with Nikola Pavletich at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. In 2001 she joined St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a faculty member and became the Joseph Simone Endowed Chair of Basic Research there in 2014. She was named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2005, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. In 2017 she moved to the Max Planck Institute after 16 years at St. Jude’s.
Her research focuses on how post-translational modifications regulate proteins in eukaryotic cells, especially ubiquitin-like proteins such as NEDD8, and the enzymes that attach these tags, particularly E3 ubiquitin ligases.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:28 (CET).