University of Rochester
California Institute of Technology
Occupation(s)
Geneticist, Stanford W. Ascherman Professor chair of genetics department, Stanford University director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine
Known for
RNA sequencing, ChIP-chip and CHIP-seq(11), genomics, pioneering multi-omic longitudinal health tracking, wearable technology, systems biology, systems medicine
Snyder's research focuses on "omics", the study of genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, and other high-throughput omics datasets. His lab has contributed to understanding the genomes and transcriptomes of yeast and humans. The lab also pioneered the use of multi-omic longitudinal profiling to monitor health.[4][5]
Snyder began his academic career at Yale University in 1986 as an assistant professor in the department of biology.[8] He was granted tenure at Yale in 1994 and became chair of the new molecular, cellular, and developmental biology (MCDB) department from 1998 to 2004. During his tenure at Yale, he also directed the Center for Genomics and Proteomics.[1][9] His research at Yale included work on chromosome segregation and cell polarity, leading to the identification of a number of related genes.[10][11]
In 2009, Snyder joined Stanford University, where he chaired the genetics department and directed the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine.[3][9] He has also 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 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.[25]
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.[9]
