Sam Gellman is the Ralph F. Hirschmann Professor of Chemistry and a Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He currently serves as department chair. Gellman earned his A.B. from Harvard University in 1981 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University, under Ronald Breslow, in 1986. After an NIH post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, with Peter Dervan, Gellman joined the faculty at the UW-Madison in 1987. Major research areas in Gellman's program blend chemical biology, organic chemistry and biophysics. Specific topics include the origins of peptide and protein folding and association preferences, creation of new amphiphiles for membrane protein manipulation, and development and application of unnatural oligomers that display protein-like conformational behavior ("foldamers"). Over the past decade, this last area has included work motivated by the peptide hormones that activate class B1 GPCRs. The group has sought to modulate signaling profiles via unorthodox modifications of the natural hormones, including replacement of L-α-amino acid residues with β-amino acid residues or D-α-amino acid residues.