Uli Schmitz is an Executive Director in Gilead’s Structural Biology & Chemistry Department. Originally trained as an organic chemist at the TU Aachen (Germany), his interest in biomolecular structure drew him to UC San Francisco, where he spent over a decade, first as a postdoc then as Adjunct Faculty in the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Department working on the determination and modeling of solution structures of nucleic acid protein complexes. Following his desire to use structures for drug discovery, he joined a small Bay Area biotech, Genelabs, which initially focused on nucleic acid-based drug discovery. Eventually, it was the HCV discovery work that led to the acquisition of Genelabs by GSK, after which he joined Gilead Sciences where he has been leading the computational chemistry group. He has also been project leader for multiple antiviral discovery projects and is part of Gilead’s emerging technologies evaluation team.