Michael P. Snyder

Michael P. Snyder is an American genomicist and the Stanford B. Ascherman Professor, and since 2009, chair of genetics and director of genomics and personalized medicine at Stanford University. He is the former director of the Yale Center for Genomics and Proteomics. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. During his tenure as chair of the department at Stanford, U.S. News & World Report has ranked Stanford University first or tied for first in genetics, genomics and bioinformatics.

Snyder has co-founded companies in genetics, genomics, and personalized medicine, including Personalis, a company that develops software to interpret genomes after sequencing; January AI, a health startup; Protometrix; Affomix; and Q Bio.

Snyder has been a principal investigator of the ENCODE project since its inception in 2003, and co-director of the CIRM Center for Stem Cell Genomics and director of the Center for Genome of Gene Regulation.

Snyder pioneered the use of multi-omic longitudinal profiling to track health.

Early life and education
Snyder was born in 1955 and grew up outside of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. 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 on a scholarship. He went on to receive a PhD in biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he trained in the laboratory of Norman Davidson. Snyder completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University School of Medicine in the laboratory of Ronald W. Davis. There he was involved in several projects including establishment of successful cloning of genes using antibodies.

Career
Snyder worked at Yale University in 1986 as an assistant professor in the department of biology, and was granted tenure in 1994. In 1998, the department of biology split and Snyder served as chair of the new molecular, cellular and developmental biology (MCDB) department until 2004. His laboratory worked on chromosome segregation and cell polarity, and discovered a number of genes involved in these processes.

His laboratory proposed the first models by which eukaryotes select sites of cell growth.

In 2009, Snyder chaired the genetics department at Stanford University and directed the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Snyder was principal investigator of the Center of Excellence in the Genome Sciences (CEGS) from 2001 to 2011, was principal investigator for NIH Training Grants in Genomics and Proteomics (first at Yale, now at Stanford) from 2004, and is co-director of the CIRM Center for Stem Cell Genomics and director for the Center for Genome of Gene Regulation. Snyder was president of the US Human Proteome Organization from 2006 to 2008, and the international Human Proteome Organization from 2017 to 2018. 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.

Snyder has co-founded biotechnology companies, including Personalis, SensOmics, Qbio, January AI, Filtricine, Mirvie, Protos, Protometrix (now part of Thermo Fisher Scientific), and Affomix (now part of Illumina).

Research
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 at Yale initially focused on studying the genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a eukaryote model organism commonly used in genetics and molecular biology. 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 his lab has contributed a large number of data sets.

Selected publications

 * 1) Alavi, Arash, et al. . Nature medicine 2021 Nov 29:1-0.
 * 2) Bahmani, Amir, et al.
 * 3) Mishra, Tejaswini, et al.
 * 4) Robertson G, Hirst M, Bainbridge M, Bilenky M, Zhao Y, Zeng T, Euskirchen G, Bernier B, Varhol R, Delaney A, Thiessen N, …, Snyder M and Jones S. . Nat Methods. 2007;4:651-7.
 * 5) Horak, Christine E., et al. . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99.5 (2002): 2924-2929.
 * 6) The ENCODE Project Consortium. . Nature. 2012. 489(7414): 57-74.
 * 7) Wang Z, Gerstein M, Snyder M. . Nat Rev Genet. 2009 Jan;10(1):57-63. PMID 19015660.
 * 8) Hudson ME, Pozdnyakova I, Haines K, Mor G, Snyder M. . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104: 17494-9.
 * 9) Kasowski M, Grubert F, Heffelfinger C, Hariharan M, Asabere A, Waszak SM, Habegger L, Rozowsky J, Shi M, Urban AE, … Weissman SM, Gerstein MB, Korbel JO, Snyder M. . Science. 2010. 328(5975): 232-5. Epub 2010. PMID 20299548.
 * 10) Borneman AR, Gianoulis TA, Zhang ZD, Yu H, Rozowsky J, Seringhaus MR, Wang LY, Gerstein M, Snyder M. . Science. 2007;317: 815-19.
 * 11) Chen R, Mias GI, Li-Pook-Than J, Jiang L, … Snyder M. . Cell. 2012;148:1293-307.
 * 12) Li X, Dunn J, Salins D, Zhou G, Zhou W, Schüssler-Fiorenza Rose SM, Perelman D, Colbert E, Runge R, Rego S, Sonecha R, Datta S, McLaughlin T, Snyder M. . 2017 Jan 12;15(1):e2001402. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2001402. PMID 28081144

Book

 * Genomics and Personalized Medicine: What Everyone Needs to Know Oxford University Press (2016) ISBN 978-0-19023-476-8.

Awards and honors

 * Pew Scholars (1987)
 * Lewis B Cullman named chair, Yale (1996)
 * Burroughs Wellcome Scholar Award (2000)
 * Connecticut Medal of Science (2007)
 * Stanford B. Ascherman named chair, Stanford (2011)
 * Member of the American Academy of Sciences (elected 2015)
 * George W. Beadle Award, Genetics Society of America (2019)