Carly Schissel , assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State, is part of a multi-institution team that has been selected to receive funding from the Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories initiative. The international initiative aims to support teams of early-career scientists doing fundamental science to accelerate advances in laboratory technologies using automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
Schissel's team also includes Halleh Balch at Stanford University and Zhiling Zheng from Washington University in St. Louis. Together, they will use an approach that combines machine learning, automated chemical synthesis and nanoscale light manipulation to identify new peptides - short chains of amino acids that have specific functions in the body - with potential therapeutic application.
"Although peptides can offer a variety of therapeutic and diagnostic uses, the discovery of these molecules with fundamentally new activities is limited by the practicality of searching through chemical space," Schissel said, explaining that the vast possible molecular candidates must be narrowed down for additional investigation. "We are developing a way to identify structures of synthetic peptides that might have therapeutic or diagnostic properties in bulk. Then, we can synthesize the most promising options and explore their potential for drug development."
Scialog - short for "science + dialog" - was created by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement in 2010 to accelerate breakthroughs in scientific themes of global importance through intensive interdisciplinary collaboration and community-building. Now in its third and final year, the Automating Chemical Laboratories initiative has provided 50 individual awards totaling $3.3 million, funded by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation and the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation.
More than 90 individual fellows from various disciplines participated in meetings throughout the course of the initiative, creating a network poised to collaborate for decades to come. The final meeting held April 16-19 in Tucson, Arizona, brought together 45 early-career scientists from disciplines including all areas of synthetic chemistry - organic, inorganic, materials and biological; integrated and automated instrument development; engineering; materials science; computer and data science, and AI computer research. Teams of two or three fellows who had not previously collaborated - including Schissel's team - wrote and pitched 22 proposals for seed funding for innovative projects they developed at the conference.
Schissel's research falls at the intersection of chemistry and biology. By focusing on the discovery, design and synthesis of bioactive peptides with unusual amino acids and structures, she aims to create novel peptides with therapeutic potential. Her research explores how these unusual structures can bestow new functions on peptides, ultimately pushing the boundaries of drug discovery and the understanding of bioactive molecules.
Schissel's previous awards and honors include a Postdoc Achievement Award from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024, a WCC Pfizer Emergent Leader Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2023, and being named in the CAS Future Leaders Top 100 by the ACS Chemical Abstract Service division 2023. She also received a Miller Institute Research Fellowship from University of California, Berkeley. Her research has been published in journals such as Science, Journal of the American Chemical Society and Nature Chemistry.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Schissel was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2022 to 2025. She earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022 and a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Williams College in Massachusetts in 2016.
