Evan Y. Snyder, MD, PhD, FAAP

Professor and Program Director, Stem Cells and Regeneration Program Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute

Evan Snyder earned his M.D. and Ph.D. jointly at the University of Pennsylvania and studied psychology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). He completed residencies in pediatrics and neurology and a clinical fellowship in Neonatology at Children’s Hospital-Boston, Harvard Medical School, where he also served as Chief Resident in Medicine and then in Neurology. Concurrently, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Genetics. In addition to going onto the clinical faculty there in both Neonatology and Neurology (becoming the country’s first to be dual-boarded in those specialties), he also started his independent lab where he helped define the basic and translational properties of stem cells (particularly neural). He was recruited to the Sanford Burnham Prebys Institute in La Jolla to found a Center for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine and help build the stem cell program in California. Regarded as one of the “Fathers” of the stem cell field, he’s been elected to the Association of American Physicians and to the American Institute of Medical & Biological Engineering. He served two terms as Chairman of the FDA’s Cell, Tissue, & Gene Therapy Advisory Committee (after helping found the FDA/NIH Stem Cell Working Group) and presently chairs the SAB of NIH’s Genetic Disease Biobank. He’s a Diplomate of the Health Leadership Academy. His biography is included in Ashwal’s Child Neurology: Its Origins, Founders, Growth & Evolution.