Ralph Snyderman, M.D.

Director Emeritus
Chancellor Emeritus
James B. Duke Professor of Medicine Duke University

Dr. Ralph Snyderman is Chancellor Emeritus, Duke University and James B. Duke Professor of Medicine in the Duke University School of Medicine. He served as Chancellor for Health Affairs and Dean of the School of Medicine at Duke University from 1989 to July 2004 and led the transition of this excellent medical center into an internationally recognized leader of academic medicine. He oversaw the development of the Duke University Health System, one of the most successful integrated academic health systems in the country, and served as its first President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Snyderman has played a leading role in the conception and development of Personalized Health Care, an evolving model of national health care delivery. He was amongst the first to envision and articulate the need to move the current focus of health care from the treatment of disease-events to personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory care. For this work, he received the 2012 David E. Rogers Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges who referred to Dr. Snyderman as the “father of personalized medicine.” In January of 2016 Dr. Snyderman was the recipient of the PMWC Pioneer Award at the 10th Personalized Medicine World Conference. The PMWC Pioneer Award is given on occasion to a rare individual who presaged the present-day excitement regarding personalized medicine at a time when only less evolved technology and less encouragement by peers existed but nevertheless made major advances in the field.

Earlier in his career, Dr. Snyderman performed seminal research defining how white blood cells respond to chemical signals to mediate host defense or tissue damage and is internationally recognized for his contributions in inflammation research. In 1987, he left Duke to serve as senior vice president for medical research at Genentech, Inc., a pioneering biomedical technology firm. While at Genentech, he led the development and licensing of several major biotechnology therapeutics. Dr. Snyderman has received numerous honors and awards during his career recognizing his contributions to research and to developing more rational, effective, and compassionate models of health care.

A graduate of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland (1961), Snyderman received his M.D., magna cum laude, in 1965 from the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York. He served his internship and residency in medicine at Duke, and then worked as a Public Health Officer doing research in immunology at the NIH (1967-72). Dr. Snyderman joined the Board of Directors of the International Biomedical Research Alliance in 2012 and moved to Director Emeritus status in 2019.