Dr. Skolnick's research interests are in the area of computational biology. He has developed algorithms for the prediction of protein structure and folding pathways from protein sequence. He has pioneered the use of lattice-based approaches to protein tertiary structure prediction and has been extensively involved in the simulation of membranes and membrane peptides. He has developed structure-based approaches to predict protein function from amino acid sequence that can be applied to entire genomes. The emerging science of bioinformatics is his focus in the foreseeable future.

He received a Ph.D. in polymer statistical mechanics from Yale University, then held a postdoctoral fellowship at Bell Laboratories. In 1979, he joined the chemistry department at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. In 1982, he moved to Washington University as professor of chemistry and director of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry. In 1989, he joined Scripps Research Institute, then moved to the Danforth Plant Science Center in 1999. He received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and is a Fellow of the AAAS. He has served on the editorial boards of Biophysical Journal, Proteins, the Journal of Chemical Physics and Biopolymers.