In 2016, while serving as the Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, Schooley was approached by his colleague, Steffanie A. Strathdee, to help save her husband's life by using bacteriophages (phages).

Strathdee's husband, Tom Patterson, was suffering from a life-threatening multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection, that he had acquired while on vacation in Egypt.

Schooley, acting as the primary infectious disease physician, along with Strathdee and a team of researchers and physicians from Texas A&M University, Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, the US Navy, UC San Diego School of Medicine, and San Diego State University, worked together to source, purify and administer phages that were active against the strain of bacteria with which Patterson was infected.

After multiple phage cocktail administrations, provided from the partnering laboratories and companies, Patterson was cured of his infection and eventually made a full recovery.

Schooley has since published a case report on his experience in treating Patterson with phage therapy,[3] and there has been a large media coverage of the story as well.