Michael P. Snyder PhD

Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. A global leader in genomics and other omics, he has expanded his work to include exposomics and wearables with a variety of innovative approaches and studies, including this pivotal paper in Cell. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and multiomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project.

His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These include the development of RNA-Seq, proteome chips, high-resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor (TF) binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), and paired-end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes. His laboratory pioneered de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high-throughput technologies and remote microsampling for deep data profiling. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes, and regulatory networks.

Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated (e.g. lncRNAs and TF binding sites), and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species.

He launched the field of personalized medicine by combining different state-of–the-art “omics” technologies to perform the first longitudinal, detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of a person, and his laboratory pioneered the use of wearables technologies (smart watches and continuous glucose monitoring) for precision health. He is a cofounder of many biotechnology companies, including Personalis, SensOmics, Qbio, January, Iollo, January AI, Mirvie and Filtricine.