| Michael Paul Snyder | |
| Birth Date: | 1955 |
| Birth Place: | Pottstown, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality: | American |
| Known For: | RNA sequencing, ChIP-chip and CHIP-seq(11), genomics, pioneering multi-omic longitudinal health tracking, wearable technology, systems biology, systems medicine |
| Occupation: | Geneticist, Stanford W. Ascherman Professor chair of genetics department, Stanford University director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine |
| Alma Mater: | University of RochesterCalifornia Institute of Technology |
| Fields: | Genetics, genomics, personalized medicine |
| Workplaces: | Yale University Stanford University |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Dr. Norman Davidson |
| Academic Advisors: | Dr. Ronald Davis[1] |
Michael Paul Snyder is an American genomicist, a Stanford School of Medicine professor, and chair of genetics and director of genomics and personalized medicine at Stanford University.[2] [3]
Snyder's research has focused on "omics", the study of genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and other "-omes". His lab's work has specifically contributed to understanding the genomes and transcriptomes of first yeast and now humans. The Snyder lab pioneered the use of multi-omic longitudinal profiling to track health.[4] [5]
Snyder was born in 1955 and grew up outside of Pottstown, Pennsylvania.[6] [7] His father, Kermit Snyder, was an accountant and his mother, Phyllis Snyder, was an elementary school teacher. Snyder attended Owen J. Roberts High school in Pottstown. He received a BA in chemistry and biology from the University of Rochester, NY and went on to receive a PhD in biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he trained in the laboratory of Norman Davidson.[8] [9] Snyder completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine in the laboratory of Ronald W. Davis.[9]
Snyder started at Yale University in 1986 as an assistant professor in the department of biology.[8] He was granted tenure at Yale in 1994. In 1998, the department of biology split; Snyder served as chair of the new molecular, cellular and developmental biology (MCDB) department until 2004 as well as the director for the Center for Genomics and Proteomics.[9] His laboratory worked on chromosome segregation and cell polarity, which led to the discovery of a number of genes involved in these processes.[10] [11]
In 2009, Snyder moved to Stanford University where he chaired the genetics department and directed the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Snyder has served as principal investigator of the Center of Excellence in the Genome Sciences (CEGS) from 2001 to 2011 and is currently co-director of the CIRM Center for Stem Cell Genomics,[12] as well as director for the Center for Genome of Gene Regulation.[13]
Snyder was president of the US Human Proteome Organization from 2006 to 2008, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015, and president of the international Human Proteome Organization from 2017 to 2018.[14] He currently leads the National Institutes of Health's Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE)'s production center for mapping regulatory regions of the human genome.[15]
Snyder has co-founded biotechnology companies, including Personalis,[16] SensOmics,[17] Qbio,[18] [19] [20] January AI,[21] Filtricine, Mirvie, Protos, Protometrix[22] (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific), and Affomix[23] (now part of Illumina).[24]
Snyder has made contributions to medicine, genomics, and biotechnology. Snyder's laboratory has invented a number of novel systems-wide and genomics technologies. Snyder's laboratory initially focused on studying the genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a eukaryote model organism commonly used in genetics and molecular biology.[25] Later, the lab began to use the same techniques to look at the human genome.
In 2003, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project was launched by the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), with the goal of identifying all functional elements in the human genome. He has been a principal investigator in the ENCODE project since its inception in 2003 and the Snyder lab has contributed a large number of data sets.