He earned his
B.S. in
biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his Ph.D. in
chemistry from the
California Institute of Technology under the guidance of
Eric H. Davidson. While a graduate student, he worked with Keiichi Itakura and
Arthur Riggs to help synthesize
Somatostatin for
Herb Boyer at Genentech. After finishing his graduate studies, he did a brief postdoc with Davidson and later with
Eric Kandel and
Richard Axel at
Columbia University. Scheller joined the Stanford University faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences in 1982 and later the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology. He was an investigator with the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1990 to 2001. While at Stanford, he cloned and identified the proteins that control neurotransmitter release notably those in the
Syntaxin family of transport proteins,
Rab GTPases, and
SNAREs. In 2001, he was recruited from Stanford to join Genentech as a senior vice president and chief research officer, replacing Dennis Henner. In 2008, was named the chief scientific officer and executive vice president of research. After the acquisition of Genentech by
Hoffmann-La Roche, he was appointed the head of Genentech research and early development and a member of the enlarged Roche Corporate Executive Committee. He is concurrently an adjunct professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the
University of California San Francisco. In March 2015, Scheller joined 23andMe as the chief scientific officer and head of therapeutics, creating and leading their
therapeutics team, which translates genetic data into discovery and development of new drug therapies. Scheller is also known as an expert and enthusiastic collector of traditional and historical African art, since the 1980s. An article about his passion for African art appeared in
Tribal Arts Magazine, and some of his extensive collection was exhibited and published with the 2015 show entitled "Embodiments" at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. ==Awards==