The Scripps Research Institute, famous for its work in areas such as neurodegenerative diseases and autoimmunity, will have a new president next year. Beginning in January 2012, Michael Marletta will succeed current president Richard Lerner, who has led the La Jolla, California-based biomedical research powerhouse for the past 25 years, the institute announced this week.

“The opportunity to go to a place whose prime focus is biomedical research was just too exciting to pass up,” Marletta told Nature Medicine.

Marletta, a biochemist at the University of California–Berkeley who studies the cellular functions of nitric oxide, says that the experience of serving as chair of the university’s chemistry department from 2005 to 2010 inspired him to consider the more prominent administrative role. “While I didn’t enjoy the UC bureaucracy, what I did enjoy was being able to look ahead and create a bit of a vision,” he says.

Once at the helm at Scripps, Marletta plans to maintain a lab of a dozen people while at the same time building up the institute’s research infrastructure and expanding the number of up-and-coming scientists on the faculty. “We’re going to embark on a major fundraising effort that will involve raising funds to hire the next generation of young people to come to Scripps,” he says.

Lerner, who was not involved in choosing his successor, says that Marletta’s research and administrative skills are a good fit for the institute. “Mike will be a very good custodian of the flagship of the place,” he says. In fact, he adds, “I tried to hire him twice before as a research scientist.”

After the leadership handover, Lerner, who oversaw a tripling of the institute’s laboratory space, a four-fold increase in staff levels and Scripps’ expansion into a satellite campus in Palm Beach, Florida, plans to head back to the bench and devote his attention full time to his research into catalytic antibodies and combinatorial antibody libraries.

Image: Michael Barnes, UC–Berkeley