Ralph Snyderman

Ralph Snyderman is Chancellor Emeritus at Duke University, James B. Duke Professor of Medicine, and Executive Director of the Duke Center for Personalized Health Care. He served as chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine from 1989 to July 2004. Under his leadership, Duke University created the Duke University Health System (DUHS) to develop and operate a comprehensive health delivery system, and he was its founding President and Chief Executive Officer. DUHS, with its practice networks, ambulatory care centers, home health services, community hospitals, university hospital, and satellite collaborations demonstrated the power of academic medicine to deliver the best of care to broad communities. Snyderman helped lead the creation of the largest academic clinical research organization worldwide. During his tenure, Duke University Hospital was ranked 6th overall in the nation and its medical school ranked 4th. Snyderman is a leader in the conception and development of personalized health care, an evolving model of national health care delivery. He has articulated the need to move the current focus of health care from the treatment of disease-events to personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory care that is focused on the patient. As Senior Vice-President at Genentech, he led the development of powerful new molecular biology therapeutics. Ralph Snyderman was the recipient of the 2012 David E. Rogers Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges which recognized him as "The Father of Personalized Medicine." He is a member of the Association of American Medical Colleges (chair 2002-2003), Association of American Physicians (President 2003-2004), American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.

Snyderman accepted his first faculty appointment at Duke in 1972. His laboratory successfully discovered important aspects of the role of the complement system and cytokines in leukocyte migration and innate immunity. By 1984, he was the Frederic M. Hanes Professor of Medicine and Immunology and chief of the Division of Rheumatology and Immunology.  His research into how white blood cells respond to chemical signals to mediate host defense or tissue damage was internationally recognized. In 1987, Snyderman left Duke to join Genentech, Inc., the pioneering biomedical technology firm, as Senior Vice President for medical research and development. While at Genentech, he led the development and licensing of major biotechnology therapeutics including Activase, a clot-busting drug made through the novel approach of recombinant DNA technology. He returned to Duke in 1989 as Chancellor for Health Affairs, Duke University, a position he held until 2004. Since then, Snyderman established and leads the Duke Center for Personalized Health Care which provides a platform for research directed at developing new models of care. Snyderman has served on numerous corporate boards of directors, including Procter & Gamble, Press Ganey, Purdue Pharma, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), and Trevena. He was named as a defendant in the Massachusetts Attorney General's complaint against the company in 2019 in connection with his board membership from 2012 through 2017. Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty 3 felonies covering the period between 2007 and 2017.

Snyderman was born on March 13, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Russian immigrants Morris and Ida (Candeub) Snyderman. He grew up in the Bensonhurst area of Brooklyn. He was a 1961 graduate of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, and received his MD Magna Cum Laude in 1965 from SUNY Downstate Medical Center. He served his internship and residency in medicine at Duke and later worked as a Public Health Officer doing research in immunology at the National Institutes of Dental and Craniofacial Research from 1967-72. There, he had the opportunity to learn how to separate proteins, measure cellular chemotaxis, and make an important biomedical breakthrough early in his career: the discovery of complement factor 5a (C5a) as an immune cell chemotactic agent while the field was still in its infancy.