Michael P. Snyder

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. He attended Owen J. Roberts High School and later earned a BA in chemistry and biology from the University of Rochester. Snyder completed a PhD in biology from the California Institute of Technology, where he trained in the laboratory of Norman Davidson. He pursued postdoctoral training at Stanford under Ronald W. Davis.

Snyder began his academic career at Yale University in 1986 as an assistant professor in the department of biology. 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. His research at Yale included work on chromosome segregation and cell polarity, leading to the identification of a number of related genes.

In 2009, Snyder joined Stanford University, where he chaired the genetics department until 2024 and directs the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He has also served as principal investigator of the Center of Excellence in the Genome Sciences (CEGS) from 2001 to 2011 and was co-director of the CIRM Center for Stem Cell Genomics, as well as director for the Center for Genome of Gene Regulation.

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. He led 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), Affomix (now part of Illumina), and Iollo.