Events All Events

Michael Snyder is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor and the Director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

A pioneer of Precision Medicine, Dr. Michael Snyder has invented many technologies that enable 21st century healthcare, including systems biology, RNA sequencing, and protein chip technologies. He has led groundbreaking research in genomics, biotechnology, and personalized health, with a focus on how genetic variation and lifestyle affects individual health and disease, heralding a new and more effective approach to healthcare. Dr. Snyder initiated the big data approach to healthcare through his work using omics to detect early-stage disease, including wearables to detect infectious diseases like COVID-19, continuous glucose monitoring to subtype pre diabetes and at-home microsampling to measure hundreds of molecules from a single drop of blood. He also studies how people age, demonstrating that we all age differently and that in general, there are burst of changes at age ~44 and 60. He is known for his pioneering study where he was both a subject and researcher, which opened new pathways in the understanding of personalized medicine and laid the groundwork for precision health. He is the first researcher to gather petabytes of data on individuals, which is 1 million - 1 trillion times more data than the average clinician collects. He has published over 1000 papers and is one of the most cited scientists.

Dr. Snyder's contributions to science have been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a successful entrepreneur, having co-founded 18 companies (including 2 unicorns) with a combined enterprise value exceeding $6 billion.

Chirag Patel's long-term research goal is to address problems in human health and disease by developing computational and bioinformatics methods to reproducibly and efficiently reason over high-throughput data streams spanning molecules to populations. Patel's group aims to dissect inter-individual differences in human phenomes through strategies that integrate data sources that capture the comprehensive clinical experience (e.g., through the electronic medical record), the complex phenomena of environmental exposure (e.g., high-throughput measures of the exposome), and inherited genomic variation. He received his doctorate in biomedical informatics from Stanford University.