Ronald Zuckermann is Lead Scientist of the Biological Nanostructures Facility in the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received his B.S. in Chemistry in 1984 from Harvey Mudd College where he did undergraduate research in synthetic organic chemistry. He then went on to UC Berkeley to study Bioorganic Chemistry with Dr. Peter Schultz. His thesis work was on the synthesis of semi-synthetic nucleases capable of the sequence-specific cleavage of RNA.

After receiving the first Schultz group Ph.D. in 1989, he became one of the founding chemists at Protos Corp., a combinatorial drug discovery start-up in Emeryville, CA. There he helped develop several key drug discovery technologies such as robotic combinatorial library synthesizers, affinity selection methods and a novel class of heteropolymers called "Peptoids". Chiron Corp. acquired Protos in 1991 where this work continued and was applied to small molecule drug discovery, new biomaterials and nucleic acid delivery.

Dr. Zuckermann was promoted to Research Fellow in 2003. In early 2006, he left Chiron to join the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to do research at the interface of chemistry, biology and nanoscience. He has published over 60 papers and is co-inventor on 25 patents.