Evan Y. Snyder, MD, PhD, FAAP
Evan Snyder earned his MD and PhD jointly at the University of Pennsylvania and studied psychology, philosophy, and linguistics at the University of Oxford. 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 received the CNS Young Investigator Award in 1990 and served on the Awards and Research committees. He was recruited to the Sanford Burnham Prebys Institute and UCSD 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.
Jeffrey Neul, MD, PhD
Jeffrey Neul attended medical and graduate school at the University of Chicago and then completed child neurology residency at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. He subsequently was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Huda Zoghbi at Baylor where his interest in Rett syndrome began. He is currently the Director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center and the Annette Shaffer Eskind Professor of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. His clinical practice and research focus is on Rett syndrome and related genetically based neurodevelopmental disorders. His laboratory-based research explores disease mechanisms, tests new therapeutics, and discovers and evaluates biomarkers of disease improvement in Rett syndrome. His clinical research focuses on longitudinal natural history studies, development of outcome measures and biomarkers, and conducting clinical trials in novel therapeutic approaches to Rett syndrome.
Dr. Neul has been active in the CNS since starting training. Besides participating as a seminar speaker and organizer of symposia on Rett syndrome at the annual CNS meeting, he has participated in multiple CNS committees (Scientific Program Planning, Awards). In 2009 he was awarded the Phillip R. Dodge Young Investigator Award at the CNS Annual Meeting in Louisville, KY.