Brenda Schulman is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Joseph Simone Chair in Basic Research at St Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biology from MIT in 1996, working with Peter Kim, and then did postdoctoral studies in cell cycle research with Ed Harlow at Massachusetts General Hospital, and in X-ray crystallography of ubiquitin ligases with Nikola Pavletich at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Schulman has been named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences (2002), earned a Beckman Young Investigator Award and received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2004). She was also a joint winner of The Protein Society’s Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award in 2011. In addition, Dr. Schulman was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, and received a MERIT award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the NIH and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. Schulman’s research focuses on understanding the conjugation pathways for ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like proteins, and on the roles of these pathways in controlling cell division, in regulating signaling, and how defects in ubiquitin/ubiquitin-like protein conjugation contribute to diseases.