Born 1967 in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Study of Biology, The Johns Hopkins University, USA (1985 – 1989), PhD in Biology, M.I.T., Cambridge, USA (1989 – 1996), Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, Boston, USA (1996 – 1998) and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, USA (1998 – 2001), Faculty Member at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, USA (primary appointment 2001 – 2017, adjunct since 2017), Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA (2005 – 2017), Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (secondary since 2016, primary appointment since 2017), Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich, Department of Chemistry (since 2018).

Brenda Schulman has been honored with numerous awards for her research including the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2004), the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine (2019), and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the DFG (2019), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), the National Academy of Sciences USA (2014), and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2019).