Gerald Crabtree

A founder of Ariad Pharmaceuticals and Amplyx Pharmaceuticals, Gerald Crabtree, MD, is the David Korn Professor at Stanford University and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. With more than 30 years of experience, Gerald has pioneered multiple key insights into mammalian developmental biology, including the discovery that one gene can produce different functional proteins by alternative splicing of mRNA transcripts.

In the 1980s and 1990s, his work with Stuart Schreiber to define the Ca2+/calcineurin/ NFAT signaling pathways resulted in the first understanding of how commonly used immunosuppressant drugs function. Later Gerald’s laboratory and others determined that these signals play essential roles in the development of the heart, immune, skeletonal, and nervous systems, even causing several phenotypes of Down syndrome. More recently, Gerald’s research into epigenetics, genetics, and chromatin remodeling complexes has a connection to several human neurologic diseases and cancers.

Gerald holds a B.S. in chemistry and mathematics from West Liberty State College, in West Virginia, and an M.D. from Temple University, in Philadelphia.