When Sheng Ding was applying for graduate school, there was only one person he considered working with: chemical biologist Peter Schultz. Ding, trained as a chemist, saw Schultz’s lab at the Scripps Research Institute as the perfect place to apply his knowledge of organic synthesis to biological problems. “I was certainly narrow-minded,” Ding says. That singular focus almost cost him his PhD position. Ding didn’t show much interest in other faculty members during his interviews at Scripps, and “I heard later on that my evaluation wasn’t very good,” he says. Fortunately, Schultz “rescued that decision.” A decade later, Ding remains at Scripps.
Ding grew up in Beijing, China, on the campus of Peking University with his physician mother and high-energy physicist father. “The environment surrounding me was very much about science,” he says. Ding left China for the first time in 1994 to compete in the 26th International Chemistry Olympiad ...
