Benjamin Cravatt

Benjamin Franklin Cravatt III is a professor in the Department of Chemistry 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 field of chemical biology. Cravatt was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, He is Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology, a Cope Scholar, and a Searle Scholar. In 2026, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Early life and education His father was a dentist and his mother a dental hygienist, both of whom instilled in Cravatt an interest in biology as a child. He then received a PhD in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute in 1996,

Cravatt and colleagues pioneered the activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) chemical proteomic technology, which they used in 2010 to elucidate certain global proteomic features of cysteine proteases.

Cravatt is a co-founder of Vividion Therapeutics, Abide Therapeutics and ActivX Biosciences. He formerly served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Chemical Science.