Dr. John A. Schmidt, Jr.

Overview

Before joining Alnylam, Dr. Schmidt was Vice President and US member of the Sanofi-Aventis Global Discovery Leadership Team where he was also responsible for biotherapeutics, external innovation, and discovery initiatives in China. At legacy Aventis, he was Vice President and Head of the Respiratory and Rheumatoid Arthritis Disease Group where he worked closely with Aventis colleagues and collaboration partners at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Coley Pharmaceutical Group to advance more than 15 NCEs into preclinical development. Dr. Schmidt had previously served as Senior Director of Immunology and Rheumatology at Merck Research Laboratories where his group conducted fundamental work on interleukin 1 beta, particularly its cognate processing enzyme, caspase 1. Dr. Schmidt received his undergraduate degree from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia before completing his MD, internship, and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Immunology and the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. He is author or co-author of more than sixty scientific papers, book chapters, or meeting proceedings.