Dr. Schooley is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  He completed an internal medicine residency at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and infectious disease fellowships at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Massachusetts General Hospital.  He joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in 1981 and shifted his research focus from herpesgroup viruses as recognition of the AIDS epidemic developed.  His early research efforts were directed at the definition of the role of HIV-1 specific cellular immune responses in the immunopathogenesis of HIV-1 infection.  He also became heavily involved in both preclinical and clinical antiretroviral chemotherapeutic research.  

He was recruited to the University of Colorado in 1990 as Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases where he developed an integrated HIV program clinical care and research program.  He was elected Chair of the NIH’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) in 1995 and led that group until 2002 during which time the ACTG performed many of the seminal studies that defined modern antiretroviral chemotherapy. He then led the ACTG in its expansion from a domestic US research operation into one with a global reach with research units in Africa, India, Thailand, Haiti and Latin America.  

In 2005, he joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego where he served as Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases until 2017. During this period he developed a multidisciplinary collaboration with Mozambique’s Universidade Eduardo Mondlane that served as the model for the United States Department of State’s Medical Education Partnership Initiative.  In 2017 he was appointed as UC San Diego’s Senior Director of International Affairs. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Clinical Infectious Diseases. His research interests are in the diagnosis, pathogenesis and therapy of viral infections and in global health. More recently, he has become interested in the use of viruses as therapeutic agents – namely the use of bacteriophages to treat multidrug resistant bacterial infections.