Benjamin Cravatt III

Benjamin Franklin Cravatt III is a professor in and chair of the Department of Chemical Physiology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Considered a co-inventor of activity based proteomics and a substantial contributor to research on the endocannabinoid system, he is a prominent figure in the nascent field of chemical biology. Cravatt was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

Cravatt attended Stanford University, earning BS in the Biological Sciences and a BA in History. He then received a PhD in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute in 1996, where he worked under the joint supervision of Dale L. Boger and Richard Lerner. His early contributions to the cannabinoid field include identification and characterization of the endocannabinoid-terminating enzyme fatty acid amide hydrolase, FAAH, as well as the isolation of the novel soporific compound oleamide from cerebrospinal fluid. Since these contributions, his research program has expanded to include proteomics, metabolomics, and chemical methods for functionally annotating the roles of serine hydrolase enzymes in cancer and endocannabinoid signaling.