Solomon H. Snyder

Snyder, a former director and namesake of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, was born in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1958 and earned his M.D. from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1962.

Following medical school, Snyder served as an intern at Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco (now Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center) from 1962 to 1963 and as a research associate at the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health from 1963 to 1965, where he studied under Julius Axelrod. Snyder completed the remainder of his post-graduate training at Johns Hopkins, serving as assistant resident in the Department of Psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1965 to 1968.

Snyder joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1966 as assistant professor of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. In 1968, he was promoted to associate professor of psychiatry and associate professor of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. He was appointed full professor in both departments two years later. In 1980, Snyder established the department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins and served as its director until 2006. Snyder earned the title of Distinguished Service Professor of Pharmacology and Psychiatry in 1977 and Distinguished Service Professor of Neuroscience, Pharmacology, and Psychiatry in 1980.

During his long career at Johns Hopkins, Snyder and his research team made several key discoveries in neuroscience and molecular pharmacology. Snyder and his colleagues devised techniques for using reversible ligand binding to identify major neurotransmitters in the brain. This process paved the way for Snyder and Candace Pert’s discovery of opiate receptors in 1973, for which Snyder was awarded the Albert Lasker Award in 1978. The application of these techniques also helped streamline the development of new pharmaceutical agents, enabling rapid screening of large numbers of candidate drugs. Snyder made major contributions to the understanding of gasotransmitters, leading research on the roles of nitric oxide and carbon monoxide as neurotransmitters.

A prolific author, Snyder has published over 1,000 articles and several books, including Uses of Marijuana, Madness and the Brain, The Troubled Mind, Biological Aspects of Abnormal Behavior, Drugs and the Brain, and Brainstorming. He is one of the most cited living researchers in the life sciences, holding the highest h-index in this field from 1983 to 2002 and again from 2007 to 2019.

Snyder has received numerous prizes and awards for his research accomplishments, including the Albert Lasker Award (1978), Israel’s Wolf Prize (1982), the National Medal of Science (2003), and the National Academy of Sciences Award in the Neurosciences (2013). He holds honorary doctorate degrees from Northwestern University (1981), Georgetown University (1986), Ben Gurion University (1990), Albany Medical College (1998), Technion University of Israel (2002), Mount Sinai Medical School (2004), University of Maryland (2006), Charles University, Prague (2009), and Ohio State University (2011). Snyder previously served as president of the Society of Neuroscience and associate editor of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.