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Dr. Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor, Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University. Mike is also a co-founder of several biotechnology companies including; Protometrix (now part of Life Technologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, and Personalis, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies. He received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He served on the faculty at Yale University for over 20 years before joining the faculty at Stanford. Mike has received many awards and honors during his career, including the Burroughs Wellcome Scholar Award, the Connecticut Medal of Science, and the Pioneer Award from the Human Proteome Organization. Mike is here with us today to tell us about his journey through life and science.
Mike is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, 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 launched many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. 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, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He has also combined different state-of–the-art omics technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of person and used this to assess disease risk and monitor disease states for personalized medicine.
Photo courtesy of Stanford University.